The Monsters Inside Us
by Appelia
Summary: Rule number one: Never fall in love with someone who has a terminal disease.
1. Rule Number One

Never fall in love with someone who has a terminal disease.

I know how it sounds. But let's face it. It's a good rule to live by. You'll be saving yourself a lot of wasted time and heartbreak. Not to mention the thousands of dollars that would have been lost paying for medical expenses, and then the therapy bills for cleaning up the colossal mess you made for yourself. Falling in love with someone who's dying is like keeping a ticking time bomb as a pet. You know it's going to go off sometime. And when it does, it's going to destroy everything around it. Then you will be left to fix all the things that were broken because you couldn't defuse the situation before it was too late.

This is the only rule I've ever lived by. At least, it was the only rule I'd been living by for the past four years. Let's just put it this way. My mom died. Leukemia. And when I was twelve, I was diagnosed with the same thing. Stage two. As soon as my diagnosis was down on paper, I just knew. I knew exactly where my life was headed.

So, yeah. I'd pretty much given up on trying to fall in love. Or anything else, for that matter. I knew my life would be ending soon enough. And I wasn't about to put someone through all of the bullshit that I was still struggling to get over.

But when it all came down to it, I guess I didn't really have a choice.


	2. Welcome To My Life

**Hey. It's me again, presenting another fanfiction for your soul-destroying enjoyment.**

**Before I go any further, I'm probably going to want to issue some TRIGGER WARNINGS.**

**This fic contains ANGST. A LOT OF ANGST. It also contains hospitals, child neglect, tennage drama, major character death and a great deal of sexual tension. And cancer. Can't forget about the cancer.**

**Basically, this entire fanfic is about cancer.**

**So, needless to say, if any of these themes present a problem for you, leave. Simple as that.**

**I wouldn't exactly call this a crossover fic. I am drawing my inspiration pretty heavily from The Fault In Our Stars, but it's not exactly half and half. (not a dead Marco joke. i promise. please don't punch me.) It's still a modern day AU, but it's not exactly Hazel's world. **

**ANYWAY, moving on.**

**Welcome to my fanfiction. I hope it doesn't hurt you too much. Thanks for reading it.**

**Sincerely,**

**that one fanfiction writer known as Appelia**

* * *

><p>My name is Eren Jaeger. I am seventeen years old, and I'm dying.<p>

Let me be clear about one thing. When I was a kid, I knew well enough what cancer was. I knew it was a disease. It wasn't always curable, and usually if you had it, you died.

That was just about it.

It wasn't until later that I learned exactly what caused it. I didn't know about the genetic mutations, the cells that divide uncontrollably, and the way they build up in places they shouldn't. I didn't know about the way that the disease eats a person from the inside out and wears them down until there's nothing left. How it tortures them for as long as it wants before the end finally comes.

And believe me. Once I finally knew, I wished that I had never had to find out.

* * *

><p>I was ten years old the first time I saw cancer as it truly was.<p>

There had been something wrong with my mom for a long time before it happened. No one thought it was anything serious. It just seemed like she was getting sick a lot. It wasn't anything uncommon for an elementary school teacher. Being around a bunch of greasy little kids all day sure seemed to be taking its toll on her. It seemed like at least once a week she'd wake up drowning in her own sweat with a fever raging under her skin. The occasional aches she'd get in her bones didn't seem all that serious, either.

"It's because you kids are making me get old, that's why," she would say to me and Mikasa, that bright smile of hers plastered onto her face.

It wasn't until she started losing weight that people started to worry.

But still, my mom never acted sick. Every time she was around my us, she was just her normal self. The most I'd ever caught her giving in to her sickness was once when she passed out on the couch while I was playing Mario Kart in the basement with Mikasa. That was the first time I had realized that something was wrong. Not much later, the realization hit me that something had probably been wrong for a long time. I'd just never noticed. All that time, I hadn't been able to see past her smile and the bright, cheerful tone she always used when she talked to me. I hadn't seen how pale she'd been looking lately, or how her clothes were starting to hang off of her like curtains on a window frame. I asked Mikasa about it. She hadn't noticed either.

That was something I'd always admired about my mom. She never let anything drag her down. She was always a fighter, always putting everyone else before herself. Looking back on it now, maybe if she'd been just a little weaker, just a little more selfish, things could have ended differently.

I overheard the conversation in my parents' bedroom two days before the call came in.

My mom's voice was the first one that I heard. "I'm going to the doctor tomorrow."

"Why now? You could have gone earlier. I'm sure that no one would have given you any flack for it," my dad replied.

Oh, right. Did you think I didn't have a father or something? Well, I do. Not that he cared to prove it all that often. I kind of forgot to mention him. But let's not get into that right now.

"I... Grisha, I found something. Here," my mom stuttered. "It's right on my back... There, right in the middle."

Silence for a second. I heard my dad inhale sharply. A block of ice settled in the pit of my stomach before my mom broke the silence.

"I looked up the symptoms online," she said, her voice soft. "It all fits. I don't know when it all started. For all I know, it could have been years since-"

"Karla, how long has this been here?" my dad demanded.

"I told you, I just found it tonight."

"You just..." My dad trailed off and sighed. I heard fabric rustling on the other side of the cracked door.

"Grisha, what are you doing?"

The click of plastic on plastic. Faint tapping, buttons being pressed. "I'm calling the hospital. We need to get this taken care of. Now."

"Grisha, I said that I-"

"I know what you said!" he shot back. "You said tomorrow. I'm not going to wait until then. I don't think you realize exactly how serious this is, Karla."

"I know perfectly well how serious it is. I just..."

"You what?"

"I just didn't want anyone to worry."

My dad sighed again. "Well, what a damn fine job you did of that."

My mom sighed in defeat. I heard the tapping again, then a muffled, one-sided conversation. For what seemed like forever, there was nothing but my dad's voice murmuring scattered phrases to no one in particular.

"Yes... Yes, of course... Tomorrow... No, we can't... Yes, I'm afraid it's very serious."

Somewhere between five minutes and five years later, I heard my dad slam the phone back onto the cradle. "There. That settles it. Your appointment is at ten tomorrow morning."

"Ten?" my mom said. "I have a class to teach. How am I going to-"

"You aren't, that's how," my dad quipped. "You're not going into work tomorrow. Or any day after that until we figure out exactly what's going on with you."

"Grisha, I can't just skip out of work because of something I read online. I have obligations. I can't go around taking time off whenever I-"

"Yes, you can! In fact, maybe you should have! I still don't think you understand. Karla, you could be dying, for christ's sake!"

His words dug into me, piercing my heart like a syringe. A hand flew up to cover my mouth and stifle the little gasp that had reflexively slipped out. My dad's voice echoed in my head, over and over, the words sinking in deeper with each repetition.

_Karla, you could be dying. You could be dying. Dying. Dying._

"Grisha!" my mom hissed, her voice a harsh, biting whisper.

My dad sighed. I heard him settle back down on the bed. "I'm sorry, Karly. I- I'm just worried. That's it."

"I know, but there's no need for you to go shouting it to the world like that."

"I didn't mean to."

"The kids are right down the hallway. What if one of them heard you?"

Too late. One of them already did.

"They're going to have to find out sometime."

"I know," my mom murmured. "But we don't know anything for sure yet. I don't want everyone to start jumping to conclusions."

I heard the soft rustle of my dad's fingers brushing through her hair. "What if there are no conclusions to jump to, though? What if-"

"No, Grisha." I heard my dad's hand drop and land on the sheets. "Listen to me. I don't want you to talk that way. I don't want to hear anyone talking that way until the diagnosis is right in front of me. And until then, we won't mention it. Not to Eren, not to Mikasa, not anyone. I don't want people to start worrying before we know for sure that there's anything to worry about."

I heard more stifled noises drift through the crack in the door. My mom sighed. Dad probably had her in his arms. "Karla..."

"Do you think the kids are still awake?"

"I don't know."

"Would you mind checking?"

I heard the soft noises of someone sliding their legs over the side of the bed, then muffled footsteps slowly working their way towards the door.

At that moment, I turned away from the doorway and ran.

* * *

><p>My mom stayed home from work the next day. She didn't tell us why. She didn't need to. I had already heard all that I needed to the night before.<p>

We got the call from the doctor a day later.

I remember the way my mom told us. I was downstairs in the basement with Mikasa. It was a Friday, probably cutting close to 10 pm. We were watching The Final Destination. Or, Mikasa was watching while I clutched a couch cushion to my chest and hid behind it every thirty seconds. A boy was getting dragged down to the bottom of a swimming pool when there was a knock at the door. A second later, it swung open. Light came flooding in and streamed down the stairs.

"Eren? Mikasa? Can you pause that for a second?"

I rolled gratefully toward the center of the couch and sntached up the remote. The scrambled noise of waterlogged screaming was cut short. "What is it?"

"Your mother has something she needs to tell you. Mind coming upstairs for a bit?"

My heart turned to stone and started to sink. For some reason, I could already tell what was coming. No amount of denial could push back the recurring memory of the conversation I'd heard just two days earlier. Mikasa grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the stairs.

A minute later, everyone was sitting in the kitchen. For the longest time, everything was silent. No one wanted to speak. It seemed almost as though we'd been brought upstairs for nothing. Something deep in my soul wished that was the case.

My dad took a breath and broke the silence. "Do you want me to get started, or-"

"No, that's alright. I... I can do this." My mom was breathing so heavily that I could hear her from the other side of the table. Her gaze fixed on me for a second, then her eyes flicked towards Mikasa, then back, bouncing back and forth between the two of us.

"So... I'm sure you both remember that I stayed home yesterday," she began. She paused, waiting and watching Mikasa and me nod in agreement. "Well, I... that was because I had to go to a doctor's appointment."

Mikasa twitched. What she was thinking at that moment, I still don't know.

"And I'm afraid I have some bad news."

My dad decided to pitch in. "You might have noticed that, for a while now, your mother hasn't exactly been her usual self. What with the fevers and everything else..."

"Yes. And, well..." My mom trailed off. She slipped one hand nervously into the pocket of her jeans, the other reaching up to press against her pursed lips. It felt like an eternity before she said anything more.

"I was given some tests after the appointment yesterday morning. They had to send me to the hospital to have them done. Um... well, I've got a new doctor now. His name is Dr. Hannes. He was the one performing the tests. See... I was told I would get a call when the labs finally came up with something. And... and I got the call from Dr. Hannes today. The results came back this afternoon, and he..." She stopped for a second as if she'd forgotten what she was about to say. She picked up again before I could convince myself that it was true and I wouldn't have to hear what I already knew was coming.

"He said I have acute myeloid leukemia." She paused before adding, "It's a type of cancer."

The room went completely silent after that. I could hear my blood pulsing in my ears, air rushing in and out of my lungs. Everything was so still. I could feel my heart beating helplessly against my ribs, as if it were trying to escape.

Cancer. That was what she and my dad had been fighting about. My mom had cancer.

I heard Mikasa's voice next to my ear, broken and squeaking like I had never heard it before. "You... you have cancer?"

My mom nodded. "Yes."

That deathly silence settled again. The only thing that broke it was the sound of Mikasa's head hitting the table and the stifled cry that seeped through the neck of her sweater.

* * *

><p>My mom went to the hospital for her first chemotherapy treatment a week later. When I came to see her that afternoon, her hair looked significantly thinner than it had in the morning. So did the rest of her. Paler, too. And there were faint shadows under her eyes that I had never noticed before. She looked so much sicker there than she had at home that morning. Hospital beds and IV drips have a tendency to do that to people.<p>

Little did I know, that was just the beginning.

Within the span of a few weeks, I watched my mother, the only person who I can truly say I had known and loved for my entire life, fall to pieces. First it was her hair. The long, soft waves with the deep chocolate-brown color that I'd been lucky enough to inherit began falling out in clumps. Before long, it was gone. Her peaches-and-cream complexion quickly turned sickeningly pale. The weight loss that had started months earlier only got worse. Before a month had passed, my mom had been worn down to a shred of her former self. It hurt, seeing her like that. Seeing this disease slowly eat away at her. But all the while, the light never left her eyes. She never stopped smiling. She never stopped pulling through for Mikasa. For my dad. For me. Maybe for herself, too. She always stayed positive, even when Dr. Hannes told her that the colony of cells in her spinal cord had spread up into her brain. When her nerves lost feeling every now and again, and when memory started to hit random blank spots because of the overgrown cells strangling everything else around them. And when Mikasa and I had to start going to Shiganshina Hospital if we wanted to see her at all. Even on the day that she was given the final number of days she had left. Because as far as I knew, she wasn't giving up.

And that's what she told us. That's what she told us, right up until the day she died.

And that was it. That was what happened. I wish I could say that she did something heroic, that was being held like a fragile little doll in death's clutches and somehow managed to wriggle free. But no. That didn't happen.

She just stopped breathing.

Two years later, it was my turn. Same symptoms. Same diagnosis. Same disease. Leukemia. The relentless sickness that had killed my mother had somehow made its way to me.

Everything began to fall apart after that.

* * *

><p>Like I said before, I was diagnosed with leukemia when I was twelve. So, to make things quick, I'd spent the past four years of my life in constant fear that it would be ending soon. At least, that's what it was like at first. When our mother had been diagnosed, Mikasa had been the first one to cry. When it was my turn to get tossed onto the terminal disease bandwagon, the role of first crier was assigned to me. I don't know what had upset me so much about it. Maybe it was the memory of my mother. At least, what used to be my mother before her disease had morphed her into something else. Maybe I was scared that the same thing would happen to me. Or maybe I was scared of what it would do to the people around me, everyone in my life that I cared about. Whatever the reason, the second the words were out of Dr. Hannes's mouth, the realization hit me like the front bumper of a speeding car.<p>

I was going to die. And there was nothing I could do about it.

That was the third week in July. For the entire rest of the summer, I was getting sent to the hospital, getting screened for tumors, signing up for studies, having blood tests taken and a billion other things that I've either forgotten or blocked out of my memory. They finally settled on giving me regular infusions of the latest magical cancer-killing drug, called Mariatrexate. They said that it contained molecules that would form a barrier over the cancerous cells in my ribs and keep their growth from spreading. Sure enough, the hospital visits finally started to slow down by the time I started seventh grade. So the miracle drug was working. Yay, Mariatrexate.

It was around that time that me and my dad started drifting apart.

It wasn't exactly sudden. He'd been a lot quieter ever since the night that my mom died. He spent most of his time at work, leaving me and Mikasa home alone for most of the day. But he still came home at the same time every night, and he was still willing to talk to us if we talked to him first. Things still had a touch of normalcy to them.

But that was before I was diagnosed.

I didn't know what his reasons were. I still don't know. He'd never been very straightforward when it came to talking about things that upset him. The best I could do was guess. Maybe it was because he still hadn't learned how to cope with what happened to Mom. Or it could have been because the disease that had killed his wife was now dead-set on doing the same to his only biological child.

I think I might have forgotten to mention that Mikasa was adopted.

Whatever his reasons happened to be, he started spending less and less time around us and more at the lab complex where he worked. He was a microbiologist. He studied infectious diseases and developed medications for some big pharmaceutical company that I can't remember the name of. He'd racked up a lot of renown for himself in the process, too. Apparently his research has done a lot to contribute to the medical field.

Maybe that's what had him so upset. He was being paid to study diseases and figure out how to fight them, but he couldn't do a single thing to figure out how to save his wife and son.

So now not only did I have a dead mother, but a father who did just about the bare minimum to keep Mikasa and me alive and mentally stable.

Seventh grade passed without a hitch. Mikasa got into her first relationship, which lasted about two weeks. I got into a fistfight with some arrogant rich kid who made fun of my emotional trauma. My dad kind of stopped giving a shit about anything. Eighth grade went by in a relatively normal manner as well. I stayed in remission. Mikasa joined the school MMA team and earned herself a whole new circle of friends. My dad switched the oncologist slot in our insurance statement over to another doctor a few miles further away from home because he no longer trusted Dr. Hannes. I had my first appointment with my new oncologist, Dr. Erwin Smith, a blonde medical god who Mikasa and I quickly nicknamed Dr. Handsome. Mikasa and I graduated middle school. I managed to stay out of the hospital for the entire summer, not including the appointments that were scheduled every month to make sure I didn't go into relapse.

Strangely enough, that was what my body decided to do at the start of my freshman year at Shignashina High.

The symptoms that hadn't reared up in over two years suddenly started coming back to haunt me. In less than 48 hours, I was back in Trost Regional Hospital, lying in an MRI chamber with needles jammed into my arms and Dr. Erwin's staff doing a CSI-caliber search of my body, trying to confirm whether the cancer in my rib marrow had spread or not. When Dr. Erwin finally figured out the root of the problem, it turned out that my worst fears had come true. My body had built up an immunity to Mariatrexate. The cancer that had been isolated in the marrow of my ribs had spread to the core of nearly every other bone in my body. The miracle drug wasn't working on me anymore.

After that, I was placed in chemotherapy and had radiation administered for the second time in my life. And for the second time in my life, I was getting torn to pieces by my disease. I was losing weight again, I couldn't keep food down, my hair was falling out from the drugs and radiation... I was a human disaster. I don't know what else to say.

Towards the end, Dr. Erwin assigned me a new treatment drug. Rosevelin, they called it. It was supposed to be more powerful version of Mariatrexate. Something that would be harder to form antibodies against and do a little more to keep my cancer from becoming uncontrollable again. Supposedly I would be getting treatments more often and the new medication wouldn't wear off nearly as fast as Mariatrexate had. I didn't know whether the promises would hold true or not.

By the time it was all over, I'd been out of school for over a month. It was at that point that my dad took me out of Shiganshina and enrolled me in a homeschooling program. If month-long hospital stays were going to become a regular occurrence, then there was no point in trying to keep me on a regular school schedule. I would never be able to catch up.

Despite the new doses of Rosevelin in my system, I ended up in the hospital for a few days out of January, then again in March. Both times the basic leukemia symptoms had come back and hung over my head until I couldn't stand them anymore. And both times they ran tests on me while I waited impatiently for my symptoms to go back into remission. It wasn't anything serious, they said. Just precautions. They wanted to keep the cells controlled. Wanted to make sure that they didn't start growing or spreading. Most importantly, that they weren't taking root anywhere else in my body.

Sure enough, that was what happened in the beginning of that summer. That clusterfuck ended up in another extended hospital stay. I wasted almost my entire summer confined to white plaster walls, gray linoleum and fluorescent lighting that year. I would have given anything to get out of there. To see what was going on in the world outside. But no. As long as the cancer was there, I knew it wasn't possible.

After that was sophomore year. Or at least it would have been, if I were still enrolled in a normal high school. I never realized exactly how much easier it was to keep track of the passage of time when there was a school schedule to adhere to. Mikasa was the only reason why I even knew what season it was. There were another three hospital visits between the scheduled start of the school year and the day Mikasa came home with her last-semester report card. I didn't know which time that was that I had been turned into a hairless skeleton. I'd stopped bothering to keep count at that point.

So, to sum things up, everything sucked.

That was the state of my life at the beginning of that summer.


	3. That Summer

**I'm back with another sporadic update. Now that I think about it, the first few chapters of this story are probably going to be sporadic. Because I'm lazy and I don't like going back to read things I wrote over three months ago. Also because I'm trying to keep up with two fics at once, and neither of them are finished.**

**Sorry.**

**Well, up until this point it's been nothing but backstory. We're done with that. I promise.**

**Well, almost. But that's something we'll worry about in another update.**

**Once more with the trigger warnings: angst, shipping, lethargy, drama, major character death and CANCER. WE CAN NOT FORGET ABOUT THE CANCER.**

**And again with the self-promotion: follow asking-appelia on tumblr. Because that's me. My posts on there are almost as scattered as the updates I make on here. You can follow my main blog at lord-ravioli if you don't mind getting spammed with reblogs every day. Most of them are pretty worth seeing, though. Otherwise I wouldn't have reblogged them.**

**Now it's time to figure out where the hell I' m actually going with this story. Thanks for sitting through the background crap. Hope you enjoy the rest of it.**

* * *

><p>For the record, signing up for the support group wasn't my idea.<p>

I guess you can say I blame Mikasa for getting me into all the deep shit that I'm in now. After all, I wasn't the one who came sweeping through the door one summer afternoon toting a flyer that I'd just ripped off a coffee shop bulletin board.

I was up in my room, as usual, with my shades pulled down and my laptop sitting in front of me on my bed, streaming as much Netflix as I could possibly fit into a 24-hour period. Since the past two summers had been nothing but leukemia, leukemia-related misfortunes and other leukemia by-products, I wasn't really expecting anything from that one. Well, other than another relapse and hospital stay. But at that point in my life, that was something I had sort of started to expect every day.

I almost missed the first warning sign, the slamming of the front door. My headphones had almost completely blocked out the noise. I was lucky enough to hear just the faintest whisper of an exhaustive slam slip through and think to hit pause before the noise of combat boots stamped out their steady rhythm on the hardwood floor of the downstairs hallway. After that came the scattered _thump_ of an overstuffed messenger bag hitting the floor. I took my headphones off just in time to catch Mikasa shouting.

"Eren!" she called from the bottom of the stairs. "Eren, I'm back! You there?"

I sighed and shut the lid of my laptop. "Am I ever not?" I shot back.

Something that sounded like a breathy, half-assed attempt at human speech echoed in the hallway downstairs. A few seconds later, the footsteps in the entryway had moved to the staircase. And they were getting louder.

That was about when my adrenaline kicked in. In a matter of seconds, I'd thrown my shades up and kicked my laptop under the disordered pile of blankets on my bed. I hissed as the afternoon sunlight came flooding into my room, assaulting my eyes with its deathly brightness.

"Hey. I saw that," a cold, level voice said.

I whirled around, my eyes still squinting against the sunlight. Mikasa was leaning against the doorframe. The look on her face was stuck somewhere between indifference and slight disappointment.

I smiled nervously. "Heh. Hey, Mikasa."

Mikasa stepped over the threshold of my door, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The studs on her green khaki vest glinted in the newly revealed sunlight. I was surprised they hadn't snagged on her scarf. In fact, I was surprised the scarf hadn't snagged on anything she owned yet, since half of it was covered in studs or zippers or whatever the fuck else made clothing look hardcore and she wore that blasted red scarf every day. She looked at me and narrowed her kohl-lined eyes. "What have you been doing in here all day?"

"Um... Y-yeah, about that..." I stammered, my brain scrambling to find a response. I tried to think back to that morning. What had I been doing all day? Nothing especially significant would come to mind. I woke up. That was just about it.

Mikasa sighed. "Nothing?"

I nodded. No getting around this now.

"Have you even left your room today?"

"Well, I did for a while, but that wasn't really-"

"You know what? Never mind. I don't really care." She took a few steps further into my room, her hands relocated to her hips. She looked around at the minor trainwrecked state that my room always seemed to be in, no matter how often I cleaned up in there. A second later, her eyes landed on me. "You're still in your pajamas, aren't you?"

I looked down. Sure enough, there was a rumpled old Black Sabbath shirt and pair of grey plaid boxers hanging off of my just-a-little-emaciated frame.

"Um... yes."

"Do you have any idea what time it is?"

I glanced at the clock sitting on my dresser. It was 3:14 in the afternoon.

_Shit._

"Eren, for the love of-" Mikasa growled under her breath and slapped a hand to her forehead. "Okay. I'm going to walk out. And you'd better be dressed by the time I get back. Got it?"

I nodded. I didn't think Mikasa would be too cross with me just for wasting nearly eight hours doing the closest thing to nothing that I could do without being six feet under. She'd never gone all-out on me like she'd done to her eighth-grade ex-boyfriend. And I knew she never would. Besides, it wasn't like wasting days on end like this was anything new, coming from me. But I still wasn't about to screw around with her. For all I knew, if I didn't do as I was told she'd strip me down and redress me herself.

Sometimes I really wished she didn't care about me so much.

I watched as Mikasa spun on her heel and traipsed out into the hallway. The door of her room swung shut a few seconds later, then I heard the loud, heavy _thump_ of her combat boots flying off and hitting the door of her closet. I immediately ran to my dresser and ripped the drawers open. Within a few seconds, I'd dragged out a fresh tee shirt and pair of cargo shorts and swapped out my pajamas for the clothes I'd be wearing for however many hours remained of that day.

Mikasa came back three minutes later. "Impressive," she said, a smirk tugging at her lips.

I glanced over my shoulder at her. "Yeah. Because nothing wakes you up like a nice panic attack, right?"

"Come into the kitchen," she said. She walked into the room and grabbed me by the wrist, removing the possibility that there would be any choice in the matter. "There's something I wanted to show you."

I turned and let her drag me towards the door. "What is it?"

"You'll see. Come on."

I shuffled along behind her, still feeling as though I had just woken up. I couldn't even remember what time I actually had woken up that morning, only that by then, my dad had already left for work and Mikasa had gone to meet some people for her volunteer position at the library over the summer. When we got to the kitchen, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I started to wonder exactly what it was that Mikasa had wanted me to see.

"Um, Mikasa-"

"Alright, so before we get into this, I just want to explain something," she said, reaching for a crumpled sheet of bright orange printer paper. I stared at it. What was that?

"I stopped at Beans on the way back from the meeting for that position at the library today. You know Beans, that little coffee shop in the middle of town?"

I stared numbly at her. "Yeah. Sort of."

"Well, I was there, just hanging around waiting for my order to come in when one of the baristas recognized me. Turned out that she was one of the senior advisors from last year. She took us around the school for orientation. Her name's Clara. Remember?"

"Vaguely," I mumbled.

"Anyway, she asked me how you were doing-"

"And what did you tell her?" I cut in.

Mikasa glared at me. "You gonna let me finish first?"

I returned the favor. "Mikasa, seriously. What did you tell her?"

She sighed and flicked a stray hair out of her face. Okay, I'll admit it. I might have been getting a little defensive. But Mikasa knew that I got that way sometimes. Or all the time. Either way, I was fairly sure that after putting up me for four years, Mikasa had just stopped giving a shit.

"The truth."

"Which is..."

"Think of it this way. You know what just happened upstairs?"

"Yeah. So?"

"Take that scenario and stretch it out over a span of about four years."

I blinked. Mikasa certainly knew how to put shit into perspective.

She straightened up and started over. "Anyway, Clara said that a couple of people from some organization at Trost Regional came in about a week ago and asked to put some ads up on their bulletin board. She said that it would probably help you deal with... you know. Everything."

I nodded, not entirely sure what I was agreeing with. "Okay. So... what is this about?"

Mikasa smirked and swept the crumpled sheet of paper towards her. She picked it up and shoved it towards me like a gift from an extremely aggressive Santa Claus. "They still had one poster left. There used to be a pull-tabs attached to the bottom with the phone number and everything else, but they'd all been ripped off. The info's on the poster, though, so I just took the whole thing."

I backed up a few inches to read the clear, blocky text.

**Suffering from cancer? You don't have to.**

**Trost Regional Hospital**

**Join YCSG!**

**(Youth Cancer Support Group)**

**June 27th - August 28th**

**In your struggle with cancer, have you ever felt alone?**

**Singled out? Unlucky?**

**Well, believe it or not, there are lots of people who have felt the same.**

**By joining the Trost Regional YCSG, you will become a valued member of a highly effective peer support group of people just like you. Take the chance to talk to other people between the ages of 12 and 18 who have gone through the same struggles as you. People who will understand.**

**Build new friendships. Learn how to cope. And above all, stay strong.**

**You are not alone in your struggle. Our main goal is to prove it to you.**

I found myself staring at the paper, suddenly having lost the ability to blink. My eyes stuck to a single phrase at the top of the page. Support group.

_Support Group._

"So let me get this straight...You want me to go to group therapy?"

Mikasa rolled her eyes, dropping her hands to her sides. "No, Eren, I want you to go to a giant rave party where everyone just happens to have cancer."

My gaze flickered up from the paper and latched onto her face. "Mikasa, are you fucking serious? I mean, do you actually think I'm that bad? I mean, sure, sometimes you are perfectly justified in hovering over me when I can't get my shit together, but I really don't think that-"

"Of course you don't," she said, turning away and leaving the paper face-up on the table. "I didn't think you would. That's why I signed you up ahead of time."

I suddenly felt as though I'd fallen face-first into cement. "You what?!"

Mikasa turned around to face me. She seemed just as calm and collected as always. "What? _You_ weren't going to do it. Someone had to."

"No," I spat, shaking my head. "No, no one _had_ to do anything. I'm fine. I don't need..." I flicked my hand at the paper. "... group therapy or whatever this shit is."

Mikasa's face didn't change, but I saw her eyes flare in frustration. "Okay. Let me get one thing straight, Eren," she snapped, her voice turning stone-cold and factual. "You've been acting like an emotionally repressed little pansy for the past four years of your life. At first, that was fine. You'd just been diagnosed. That's a lot of deep, dark shit to get dumped onto your shoulders all at once. Not to mention that Mom had just died of the exact same thing. So I sort of expected you to take up the hopeless, lethargic, oh-god-what-do-I-do mentality. But you know what's supposed to happen after that, Eren? You get over it. You accept what your life has turned into and you learn to cope with it."

"And you think that's not something I've been trying to do?"

Mikasa stared at me, taking on an expression I can only refer to as her are-you-fucking-kidding-me face.

"Look, Mikasa, I've given it my best. I tried going to the guidance counselor after Mom died. After I got diagnosed, too. And I kept my grades up while I was still in school. Getting homeschooled wasn't my idea. And it's not like it was something I wanted to do. I just couldn't keep up with all the time I was spending in the hospital-"

"And that's why you should go," Mikasa finished for me as if that were actually what I was going to say. Her face softened again. She stopped leaning against the counter and took a step towards me. "I know that things have been hard for you. And trust me. They've been hard for me, too. It wasn't just _your_ mom who died. And it sure as hell wasn't _y__our_ brother who'd been given the closest thing to a death sentence that doesn't involve going to court."

My eyes widened. Leave it to Mikasa to make you realize exactly how much of a selfish asshole you really are.

"And let's face it," she went on. "You need to make some friends somewhere."

My brain stuttered. _Did I hear that right?_ "A-are you telling me that I have no friends?"

"Am I the one who spends half his life in the house and the other half in the hospital?"

I fixed her with a deadened stare and pressed my lips into a taut, frustrated line. "Okay, fine. Maybe I do need to get some friends. Maybe."

Her face brightened up again. She leaned forward, flattening out the flyer on the table under her hands. "So are you agreeing to this, or am I going to have to drug you and bring you in the trunk of dad's car?"

I sighed in defeat. "You already signed me on, so I'm just going to take a wild guess and say neither isn't an option."

Mikasa straightened up and smiled. "So the answer is yes, then." She spun around and walked out of the kitchen."Oh, and the first meeting is on the twenty-fourth," she called over her shoulder.

Well. That told me what I would be doing next Tuesday.

* * *

><p>On June twenty-fourth at approximately 2:56 PM, I climbed out of my dad's car and planted my feet on the pavement of the Trost Regional Hospital parking lot. Mikasa spilled out of the passenger seat, the support group flyer sloppily folded up and crammed into her messenger bag. She said a quick goodbye to our dad, promising him that yes, it was an hour exactly, and he wouldn't have to wait around for us too long before we got out.<p>

I could not believe I had agreed to this.

Mikasa rounded the front bumper of the car and stood in front of me, digging around her bag for the flyer. I slammed the back left door shut as she unearthed the crumpled piece of paper from the jumbled mess inside. She tugged it out of its fragile origami folds.

"Alright. The flyer said conference room 4A, which is on the... first floor."

I still could not believe I had agreed to this.

Dad backed out of his parking space and rolled back out onto the road, headed back towards his microbiology lab to do whatever infectious disease research that wouldn't help me in the least that he'd been doing lately. Mikasa and I started across the parking lot, drawing closer to the towering structure that I'd seen far too many times in my life. I don't think anything would have made me happier than seeing it burn to the ground. I spent enough time in the hospital as it was. I was sick of this place. If I had to start going twice a week like the flyer commanded, I would go insane.

In no conceivable way could I believe that I had... fuck it. You get the point.

I kept up with the fast clip of Mikasa's boots as we walked through the huge glass-paneled automatic doors at the main entrance. She marched straight up to the front desk, leaving me straggling behind. Clearly, someone was a lot more eager than someone else.

"Hi," she said cordially to the receptionist. "Me and my brother are here for the cancer support group. How do we get to conference room 4A?"

"4A?" the receptionist echoed, looking up from her computer screen. "That's just down the hall to your left, then a right at the elevators. It's a straight shot through radiology from there."

"Thanks," Mikasa said with a nod. She spun around, taking me by the elbow just as I caught up with her. She reassuringly squeezed the barely-there flesh of my arm and tugged me towards the appointed hallway. I sighed. No turning back now. I was going to do this group therapy thing, whether I liked it or not.

Neither of us spoke as Mikasa led me through the all-too-familiar hospital corridors towards whatever waited for me at the end. Finally, after dodging wheelchairs, laundry carts and rolling IV dispensers, we found ourselves in a relatively quiet hallway lined with fake oakwood doors. I glanced at the numbers beside each. 1A. 2A. 3A.

Conference room 4A. Mikasa grabbed the handle and pushed the door open.

I stepped into the room, my eyes darting in a million different directions at once. There wasn't much inside. Just a lot of cheap folding chairs, a projection screen on one wall that had been rolled up into its container, and a long table that had been pushed off to the side. The chairs had been arranged in a circle, leaving a big empty space in the middle of the room. And scattered all around were...

Kids. Just a surprising number of kids. All of them were around my age.

I don't know what I had been expecting.

I took another step and made a beeline for an empty chair in the corner of the room. The area around it looked relatively empty. Maybe that would send enough of a message to the others that I was being held here against my will and I would be leaving once all this bullshit was over and done with.

I could only make it halfway across the room before I felt a huge, muscular hand clamp over my shoulder.

"Hey!"

I whirled around, ready to snap at the stranger to leave me alone, and nearly had a heart attack the second I laid eyes on the person who had dared to violate my personal space. Standing before me was probably the biggest, scariest guy that I had ever met. He must have been over six feet tall and had more muscle on him than I could ever hope to see in my life. I had to step back to get a good look at his face. He had a huge, angular nose, narrow brown eyes and a smile that was so bright it kind of pissed me off. His hair was blonde and crew-cut close to his scalp. Either that or he'd recently started growing it back in.

"U-Um, hi," I stammered. God, he was so friendly it was terrifying. "I-I'm Eren."

"Reiner," he said, offering a hand. I hesitated before taking it only to get my bones crushed by an aggressively warm handshake. "Always nice seeing a new face in the crowd."

I let out a nervous laugh. "Y-yeah, I guess so."

I made a break for the empty chair the second he let me go.

I crash landed on the chair, my hand still numb from that stupid handshake. I made a mental note to stay away from Reiner unless I wanted to get pulverized. My eyes did a sweep of the room, searching for Mikasa. She was standing on the other side of the room, talking to some girl in lavender nurse scrubs with a messy brown ponytail and a pair of thick, nerdy-looking glasses. My sister glanced over her shoulder at me and shot me a triumphant smirk.

_Help me,_ I mouthed to her.

Mikasa turned back to her new buddy and made some quick comment that made glasses break out in smiles and let out a loud, pitchy laugh. Then she turned, walked towards me and collapsed into the chair beside mine.

"So," she said. "Who was that blonde guy who grabbed you by the door?"

"That was..." I searched my memory for his name. "Fuck. I can't remember."

Mikasa smirked again. "Awwww. He's making friends already." She dramatically wiped a few nonexistent tears from her face and placed a hand over her heart. "I'm so proud."

I folded my arms and sighed. "Shut up, Mikasa."

While I avoided looking at Mikasa, just in case she was still smirking like an idiot, my eyes started wandering around the room. There was a surprising number of kids. Before I showed up, I hadn't had the slightest idea of what it was that I was getting myself into. I didn't think Mikasa did, either. I was thinking that maybe it would be a bunch of traumatized basket cases all packed into a single room. Either that or a flock of wilting half-corpses sitting in wheelchairs and dragging around oxygen tanks. But now that I was here, the closest thing that I could compare this to was probably a classroom after a teacher leaves to make copies or something. Everyone was wandering around, seeming just a little confused, as if they weren't used to being left alone in a room without any adult supervision. Some of them were sitting, some of them standing, a couple of them were even talking as if they were already best friends. Most of them probably were.

"Alright, people, we're starting in a few minutes! Everybody take a seat!"

My head swiveled around to find the source of the voice. It was glasses girl. I stared at her for a second. She seemed a little enthusiastic for someone who was running a support group for dying kids. It made me wonder whether or not she actually knew what kind of organization she was running here.

My attention was distracted long enough to miss the tiny blonde chick dropping into the chair on the other side of me.

I looked over my shoulder at the sound of denim shorts hitting woven nylon. A girl had magically appeared in the chair next to mine, her head down and her over-long bangs hanging dismally over her face, her body slumped over underneath a grey sweatshirt that must have been at least three sizes too big for her. She glanced over at me for a split second, as if she could feel my eyes on her and the sensation pissed her off. Something told me she wanted to be here just about as much as I did.

I gave her a casual nod. "Hey," I said.

The second the word was out of my mouth, the girl dropped her gaze, slipped a cell phone out of her sweatshirt pocket and started tapping at the screen.

I sighed, rolling my eyes and tilting my head back. "Okay, that's fine," I mumbled. "Whip out your phone and start texting the second someone tries to talk to you. That's really cool."

I heard a disgruntled sigh to my left, then more furious tapping. I turned around to see the girl holding her phone up, the screen centered in the palm of her hand and inches away from my face. It was opened to a note-writing app, and a block of text was stamped across the fake yellow note paper on the screen.

**I'm not texting. I can't speak, you insensitive prick.**

My eyes flicked back and forth between the screen and her face. Her hooded blue eyes were glaring angry daggers into mine. It was only then that I noticed the tiny white scar at the base of her throat. As soon as I did, I felt the color drain from my face and my insides suddenly seemed to have stopped existing. I took a shaky, nervous breath.

"Oh."

Before that situation could become even more awkward than it already was, the door to the conference room slammed shut. My spine snapped bolt upright and my head spun in the direction of the noise. I hadn't even realized the door had been open in the first place.

"Quiet down, people! We're getting started!"

The girl with the glasses was shouting again. I let slip another exasperated sigh and recentered myself in my chair. Everybody else had taken up a spot in the circle. There was only one chair left unoccupied. Glasses quickly claimed it for herself.

"Okay," she said, her voice sounding just as irritatingly bright as the smile on her face. She was holding a little plastic clipboard now and tapping against it with a pen. "Well, first things first, I want to thank everybody for coming. Welcome to the fourth operational year of the Youth Cancer Support Group! For all our new members, which I think includes most of you, welcome to the group, and for everyone coming back from last year, welcome back! It's great to see all of you again!" She flashed a smile at two older-looking guys sitting together at one end of the chair circle. The gargantuan blonde guy was one of them. I should have guessed.

"Before we start, I just want to tell all of you new recruits a little bit about the Youth Cancer Support Group, just in case you didn't know what you were getting into when you signed up for this."

I certainly didn't. Well, isn't that just fan-fucking-tastic.

"The Trost Regional YCSG is an independently run organization that is funded by the hospital and that's pretty much all they have to do with it. The support group was started four years ago by a group of oncology nurses who noticed that a few of their patients needed a little more help coping with their disease than they were getting. We started off pretty small, and each year, the group has gotten a few more members. This year we've worked our way up to..." She stopped for a second to glance at the clipboard. "... twelve members. Wow. That's more than I thought." She smiled again, crossing her legs and tapping the clipboard on her knees.

"Now, since this is our first session of the summer, we should probably start things out with an introduction. We're just going to start things off by going around the entire circle and telling everybody else a little bit about ourselves. And remember guys, we don't do passes here. This is a support group, so we're supposed to be _supporting_ each other. And I don't think that your name should be something that you'd be uncomfortable sharing with the group. There's no getting out of this, so please don't try." Her enthusiasm dropped for the briefest of seconds before bubbling right back up to the surface. "I'll go ahead and start things off." She stood up, placing her clipboard gingerly on the chair. "Hi, everyone. I'm Hanji Zoe."

I wasn't sure if the rest of the group was supposed to respond with a deadpan _"Hi, Hanji"_ or not.

"I'm twenty-one years old, and I work as an LPN at Trost Regional. I am also a student in Sina State University during the year, and I'm working towards my bachelor's and full RN certification. I've been assisting in oncology for a year, I've been part of the YCSG since my first day, and I don't see myself leaving anytime soon." She finished with another half-witted smile before sitting down and nodding to her right.

The circuit of public embarrassment continued on its course to a nervous-looking guy sitting directly next to Hanji. With an unsteady motion, he straightened his legs out and stood up to his full height. I nearly snapped my neck trying to keep track of his face. He was even taller than blondie, towering over him by maybe three or four inches. His dark brown hair looked uncomfortably damp. So did his clothes. I shuddered. Probably a nervous sweater.

"Um... hi," he started, offering the group a forced smile. "My name's Bertolt. Bertolt Hoover." He paused, glancing over his shoulder at the massive blonde guy who had been sitting next to him. He nodded as if to say _go on_. Bertolt looked back up and continued. "Okay. I... Well, I'm eighteen years old, and I have osteosarcoma. I was diagnosed when I was fourteen, and I've been in remission for almost two years now. Let's see, what else..." He picked nervously at the edge of his pocket. "I've been part of the YCSG for the past three years, and it's been a really great experience. I met a lot of really great friends through it, and... That's just about it, I think." He collapsed back into his chair the second his speech was over.

"Nice job, Bert. Way better than last year," someone in the circle said.

The massive blonde guy who'd grabbed me by the door shook his head at the commentator and sighed before swaggering to his feet. "Hey," he said, starting things out with a bang. "For any of you who haven't met me yet, the name's Reiner Braun. I'm seventeen, and I've been in the YCSG ever since the first meeting. Back when I was in eighth grade, I was diagnosed with melanoma, which looks something like this." He pulled back the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a huge discolored patch of skin on his shoulder.

I immediately wanted to pour bleach in my eyes.

It was dark, drying-blood red in some spots, a peeling-scab brown color in others, with a vague similarity to molting reptile scales. His skin was making mine crawl. While I resisted the urge to vomit, a few murmurs of discontent were emitted from the circle. Reiner probably could have done without giving us that lovely example of his skin deformity.

Thankfully, he tugged his sleeve back down a second later. "So, as you can see, it's not exactly pretty. But being in the support group has really helped me a lot. It's helped me get over the insecurity that my disease had caused, and I've also made a lot of friends through it. It's been an amazing three years so far, and I hope it'll do just as much for you as it did for me." He sat back down with a smile.

"I told you not to show them the skin thing!" the same voice from before shouted.

"Hey, can you shut your mouth until it's your turn?" someone else snapped.

"No."

The girl next to Reiner ignored the side commentary and stood up. I took in her deep tan, even deeper freckles, and dark brown hair, the shortness and choppiness of which seemed to be a choice rather than the inevitable result of cancer treatment. "My name's Ymir," she deadpanned, not even bothering to give the group a greeting as the others had done. No last name, either. "I'm seventeen, and my cancer is rhabdomyosarcomas. If you don't know what that is,then it's basically like what Bertolt has, only it affects soft tissues instead of bone. I was diagnosed two years ago, and I've never gone into total remission. This is my first year in the support group, and..." She shrugged. "That's it." She sat down before that anonymous commentator could say a word.

The next girl seemed like a fairy in comparison to Ymir. She had to be the tiniest person I had ever seen, with big, expressive blue eyes and a peachy complexion that was dangerously close to my mom's. Her golden-blonde hair looked softer than a baby's, falling over her shoulders in wispy, uneven layers. "Hi, everyone," she said. Or sang. It could have been either one, with a voice like hers. "My name is Krista Lenz. I'm seventeen years old, and, well... I don't actually have cancer. But before anyone says anything, I just want to explain something. I might not have cancer myself, but my mother did. She died when I was just a baby, so I grew up with my grandparents, and..." She trailed off, her wide blue eyes staring off into the distance. She shook her head a second later, letting out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding. "... and you can ask me about that later if you're interested." She blinked before forcing a smile onto her pretty face again. "Anyway, I've been a part of the support group for two years, everything's been fantastic so far, and that's all there really is to say." She settled back into her chair. The entire circle had its eyes glued to her, mine included. That had to be the most tragic backstory reveal I would be hearing today.

"Yeah, Krissy!" the commentator from before blurted out. Okay, now that was starting to piss me off.

My vision snapped in the direction of the voice. It was coming from the kid in the chair right next to Krista. Or at least he used to be in the chair. Now he was standing up, looking all too eager to humiliate himself. The first thing I noticed about him was that he was completely bald. Well, mostly. There was a thin layer of fluff covering his scalp that hinted at his hair maybe being black, but that was it. His face was drawn up in a huge, stonery smile. It made me wonder if he'd ever even actually been stoned in his life.

"Hey, asshole, can it with the commentary and get on with the introduction," someone hissed.

"Alright, alright," he said, dropping the stoner grin. "Hi, everybody. My name's Connie Springer, and, unlike almost everybody else who's been talking so far, I still don't have my license. I'm sixteen years old, I have Ewing's sarcoma,which I was diagnosed with two years ago. I was put on medication and went into remission pretty quickly, but, as you can see, it's got a few side effects." He suppressed a laugh, brushing a hand over his scalp fluff.

Well, that explained the hair thing.

"This is my second year in the support group, and for all the newbies, I'm just going to put this out there. It doesn't suck as much as you think it will. It's actually pretty cool. And you get a lot out of it that you don't think you will. But you do. Trust me."

With that, Connie dropped back into his chair and tapped the shoulder of the girl beside him. She glanced over her shoulder at him, looking uneasy. He flashed her another of his toasted grins, and she sighed and stood up. She looked relatively healthy for someone in this kind of support group. Her skin wasn't pale or shadowy like some of the others', and her cherrywood-brown hair was still pretty long, by cancer patient standards.

The only problem with her was that she was an absolute twig.

Seriously. It was like seeing a stick figure that someone had decided to give clothing and a face. I was surprised that this girl could stand without her legs snapping underneath her.

"Hello. My name is Sasha Braus," she said. "I'm sixteen, going to be seventeen in a month. This is my first year with the YCSG. I know Connie from school, and he's the one who got me into it. My disease is colon cancer, which wound up giving me a malabsorption disorder after getting about a third of my digestive system removed, so please don't ask me how I stay so skinny. It's not exactly a choice." She paused for a second, as if this had all been scripted and she had forgotten her lines. "Um... I've been in remission for about a year after the surgeries and everything. I was diagnosed in seventh grade, and it was a really big shock to my entire family. The new lifestyle and everything has taken a lot of getting used to, and... and I'm glad that Connie got me into this support group, because I _really_ needed it." She took a deep, shaky breath, then glanced over her shoulder at the guy sitting next to her. He offered up a small, reassuring smile and gave her a subtle thumbs-up. Sasha dropped back into her seat without a second to spare. The next victim stood up.

"Hi. I'm pretty sure most of you already know me. My name's Marco Bodt."

Marco immediately struck me as the kind of person it would be impossible to hate.

I don't know what it was about him that was just so... inviting. His dark hair looked soft and springy, as if it hadn't been too long since it had grown in. He was pretty tall, had a cheerful collection of freckles sprinkled across his face, and could probably have passed for a healthy teenage guy to some random stranger off the street. But not to someone who knew the signs of a cancer sufferer all too well. The longer I stared, the more I noticed that his skin was just a little too pale, that there were faint shadows under his eyes, that his clothes seemed to hang off of him just a little too loosely. But for what it was worth, he hid his symptoms well.

"I'm seventeen years old," he continued, "and I've been a part of the support group ever since it first started. I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when I was eleven. I was already in stage IIB, so things were pretty bad to begin with, and I've been in and out of remission since then. As of now, it's been almost four months since my last relapse, and I don't plan on going back for a while if I can help it. As for things to say about the support group... well, I guess it's up to you guys to decide what to think." He sat back down on his chair, a satisfied glow just behind the freckled surface of his face. He cast a sideways glance at the guy next to him, as if he were expecting something. The guy didn't move. Marco sighed. "Jean, aren't you going to say something?"

"What? Me? Dude, no. This is for the support group." I recognized his voice as the one that had snapped at Connie a few introductions ago.

"But you're _in _the support group."

"Not really. I just show up at the meetings. I don't have-"

"Tell them your name, at least."

With an exaggerated sigh, the guy stood up. He was relatively tall, lanky and skinny in a way that seemed a lot more natural than the way Sasha or Marco or anybody else in the room was. Not that it made him any prettier. His vaguely horse-like face took care of that.

"Okay, if you didn't hear Marco bitching at me before, my name's Jean. Jean Kirschtein." Even the sound of his voice pissed me off. And his name. Jean. Jsheaahhn. His parents must have thought he would grow up to be fancy or something.

"I don't have cancer. Honestly, I'm just here for moral support. I've been friends with Marco since second grade, and when he started going to the support group meetings, I started going too. That's the only reason I'm here, really." He sat back down without another word.

Jean Kirschtein was clearly the biggest man-bitch I would ever meet.

"Armin. Hey, Armin, you're up next."

The sound of Hanji's voice broke through the sound barrier of my personal bubble. I realized that the room had been quiet for almost a whole minute. I glanced around the circle, trying to figure out exactly where it was that we left off.

"What? Me? Oh, sorry..."

My gaze settled on a tiny, frail-looking kid sitting in the chair next to Jean. I stared at him for a while, not sure what to make of... well, I wasn't really sure if it was a him or not. There seemed to be nothing about him or her that struck me as exceptionally gender-related either way. He/she/it had wide, sky-blue eyes peeking shyly out from under a thick layer of dirty blonde skater hair that reminded me vaguely of a coconut shell. The kid was probably the scrawniest excuse for a human that I have ever seen, with a body that probably could have belonged to either a really skinny guy or a really underdeveloped girl, making the whole gender situation even more confusing.

"Hi. I'm Armin. Arlert. I'm... I'm Armin Arlert," he stuttered. At least I thought so. The voice was a little too low to be a girl. Pretty squeaky by guy standards, though.

"I'm sixteen years old, and my cancer is non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was diagnosed when I was six, and I've had it pretty much all my life. Apparently lymphoma is a really common thing in my family. We've never been able to figure out if there's a genetic link or not, but lot of my relatives were diagnosed with the same thing, but a lot later than I was, and, well... most of them aren't around anymore. I guess I was lucky that they caught mine so early on." He jammed his hands into his cargo short pockets and took a breath before continuing. "Other than all that, I guess I have to say I've been doing pretty well. I've been in remission for almost six years now, and my last cancer-related hospital visit was more than a year ago, which is actually a record for me. So I guess I'm okay as far as all that is concerned. I haven't been declared cancer-free or anything yet, but... Things are looking up, I think." He dropped back into his chair, red-faced and breathless.

I could have sworn I heard the voiceless girl next to me whisper _Why is he even here?_

She was the next to stand up. The circle waited for her to speak up and introduce herself. Instead, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and started poking at the screen again. She crossed over to Reiner and tapped on his scaly, disease-ridden shoulder.

"Hm?" he mumbled, looking up at her. She pushed her phone shyly towards him. "Me? Oh. Okay." He took the phone in his huge, brawny hands and began reading from the screen.

"My name is Annie Leonhart," he read out loud. He glanced over at the little blonde. "Leonhart? That's a cool name." He went back to reading. "I am seventeen years old. This is my first year with the support group. Well, welcome to the club, Annie." He kept going back and forth between her and the introduction she'd given him. "I was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer when I was thirteen. I contracted it from secondhand smoke from my grandparents, who I spent a lot of my childhood with. Two years ago I had to have my vocal cords surgically removed because of a tumor that could have possibly gone malignant, which is why I can no longer speak." Reiner stopped and stared at the palm-sized screen in front of him. He switched his focus to Annie again, sympathy in his eyes. "Wow. I- I'm so sorry to hear that." His face taking on a slight frown, he turned back to her cell phone only to see that there wasn't any script left to read. He handed Annie's cell phone back, and the both of them sat down, one looking significantly more stunned than the other. I felt an elbow dig into my ribs.

"Hey, Eren," Mikasa whispered to me. "You're up next."

"Huh? What- oh." I looked around at the rest of the support group. Everyone's eyes were on me. My pulse thundering in my ears, I took a deep breath and forced myself to stand.

"H-hi, my name is Eren Jaeger," I began. My face was heating up more than a bad sunburn. "I'm sixteen years old. This is my first year in the support group, so I don't really have anything to say about it just yet." I stopped for a second, my brain scrabbling for more details. What had everyone else used? What came next? Oh, right. Diagnosis. Cancer stuff. "I have acute myelogenous leukemia, which was diagnosed when I was twelve. I've been in and out of the hospital in the past few years, but I've been in remission for just a little over three months. And..." I trailed off, trying to find something else to say. My mom. There was always my mom. She was certainly a conversation starter. Walk into a room, bring her up and suddenly _Hey! Not only is this kid dying, but he's also half an orphan!_

I took another deep breath and decided against it. I didn't care how much of a plot hole it would leave. I didn't want these people to start feeling sorry for me. I just wanted to get this over with and leave.

"And that's all there is to it, really," I deadpanned. I collapsed back into my chair like a faulty Jenga tower. Mikasa stood up without a moment's hesitation.

"Hi, everyone, my name is Mikasa Ackerman. I'm Eren's sister. Adopted, but I still consider myself his sister. I don't have cancer, so I guess that means I'm here for moral support. I've tried to be there for Eren, but we both agreed that he needed to get help from a few people other than me. You see, the funny thing about Eren's cancer is that it was the same kind that we lost our mother to when we were ten."

My eyes widened and my mouth fell open. The entire support group was staring at Mikasa. Except for the few of them who were staring at me instead.

Well, that was one way to drop a bombshell.

"So it's been a rough road so far, but we've been doing our best to pull through. And that's what we plan to do for as long as we can."

Leaving it at that, she sat back down. I immediately turned to her and stared, my eyes practically screaming _WHAT THE FUCK, MIKASA?!_

She glanced at me, responding with a _sorry, but hey, they had to find out somehow_ face.

We'd almost made it completely around the circle of social suicide. Hanji was two chairs away from me. Mikasa was blocking my view of whoever it was that had been sitting in the third chair this entire time, and I hadn't felt like putting up the effort of leaning over to see who it was. They didn't make any move to stand up. Maybe there was no one sitting there at all.

I considered the possibility for a while. Then I stopped when Hanji turned to the silent spot between her and Mikasa and said, "Well? You're the last one."

I heard a heavy sigh come drifting up from the chair. Then the stranger sitting in it stood up for all the support group to see.

I felt my heart stop the second I saw him.

It was a guy. I could have sworn that I'd seen him somewhere before. I recognized the dispassionate, almost bored expression on his face, the neat undercut of straight, jet-black hair, the sharp gray eyes that seemed to pierce through my skin and into my soul. He was short, really short, but still struck me as someone who could take down a man twice his size. It was probably his arms. They were sticking out of the short sleeves of his mint-green scrubs, just as toned and muscular as the last time I'd seen them.

He started up his introduction the same way everyone else had. "Hello. My name is..."

I knew what he was going to say before the words were even out of his mouth.

"Levi Ackerman."


	4. That Other Summer

**I'm back again. **

**This story is going a lot more slowly than I thought it would. And the backstory stuff ended up a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I'm still going with this. Now that the story line has finally kicked in, maybe people will read it.**

**But guess what.**

**IT'S TIME FOR MORE BACKSTORY CRAP.**

**See? I warned everyone that it was going to happen in the last chapter. And here it is.**

**YES, I know it's boring and frustrating and this is really dragging everything out as much as it can possibly be dragged out. But it's important. i promise. You'll see why once things turn back to the present. Or at least I hope you will.**

**Not even gonna bother with the tumblr plugs this time around. But the story does have a tag now. I'm tracking "fic:tmiu" and "fic:tmi" on tumblr now. That's all the letters and no spaces, if you're like me and have a hard time telling the difference between where there is and isn't a space. "fic:the monsters inside us" works too.**

**Let's go ahead and get this over with.**

* * *

><p>That, obviously, was not the first time I had seen Levi.<p>

It happened the summer after what would have been my freshman year at Shiganshina High.

I'd started having symptoms the week after Mikasa got out for summer vacation. It wasn't anything serious, at first. I just hadn't been as hungry as I normally was. I wasn't about to go telling my dad about it anytime soon. Not until I was sure there was actually something wrong, anyway. Knowing him, the second I said that something was off, he'd throw me into the backseat of the car and start off for the hospital. It seemed like the only time he ever bothered to prove he was still my legal guardian was when I was sick. I can't say I blamed him. Mom never let anyone take care of her whenever she got sick. And my dad was never one to force his care on her when she wouldn't accept it. We all know exactly how that turned out. I guess it was just a mistake he never wanted to make again.

The first week of July was the same week that I started throwing up. I tried to cover it up the first few times. Then there was the night that I ended up getting stuck at the dinner table while mediating (re: trying and failing to mediate) a debate between Mikasa and my dad over why she couldn't get a summer job like apparently all of her friends were. About three minutes in, my dinner suddenly felt like making a reappearance. I tried to fight it off, to stay and keep playing back-and-forth devil's advocate for my dad and sister, but my stomach wasn't having it. It didn't take long for the nausea to turn uncontrollable. I didn't have time to casually slip away like I had before. I just got up, bolted to the bathroom and purged my guts out.

Naturally, within minutes of witnessing my vomit, my dad called Dr. Erwin and told me to get in the car. I had a scheduled appointment before sundown.

For what I think was the fifth time that year, my dad and Mikasa escorted me to the cancer center of Trost Regional Hospital. My appointment with Dr. Erwin went pretty much the same way as all the others before it had. He gave me a quick once-over, poked at a few pressure points for a bit, then felt my stomach up. He said that my spleen felt inflamed or something along those lines and that he'd get a PET scan scheduled for that Thursday. He sent me home after that. So maybe things weren't nearly as bad as my dad feared they were.

Of course, by Thursday things had only gotten worse. I hadn't been able to keep anything down since the night of spontaneous vomit. I wound up being able to eat only tiny amounts of food every hour or so. Anything more than that just wound up getting regurgitated. Then there was the strange feeling I would occasionally get in the right side of my ribcage, like a rock sitting inside me where one of my organs should have been. By the time the scan results came back, I already knew what was wrong. The pictures on the disc only confirmed it.

A few stray leukemic cells had gotten into my bloodstream, and they decided to take root. I was now the proud owner of a malignant liver tumor.

By Friday, I was checked in for yet another stay at Trost Regional Hospital.

* * *

><p>That first night was an absolute hell.<p>

I hadn't been expecting another extended hospital stay that summer. But at the same time, I sort of had. That was one of the things I hated most about my disease. No one ever knew what it was going to do next. One month it would be in total remission, then the next it would relapse and start ravaging my body like some kind of zombie scourge. I was never exactly able to plan out when I would be stuck at Trost Regional next, but hospital stays had turned into just another part of my normal life.

That sure as hell didn't mean I liked them, though.

I hardly slept at all the first night. I never slept well in hospitals. Everything always seemed too cold, too clean, so meticulous and orderly that if I twitched in my sleep I would knock something over or rip an IV out or make some other life-threatening mistake. Then there was the constant noise of the monitors that were stuck to my chest. And the dull ache from the saline drip they'd plugged into my arm to combat the dehydration I'd developed from the constant vomiting. And the irritating smell of antibacterial cleaner that always seemed to be hanging in the air.

Not exactly what you'd call a prime sleeping environment.

I spent most of the night lying awake and staring at the ceiling. I was lucky enough to get placed in a room that was only half-occupied. The curtain that hung at the halfway point on the ceiling stayed drawn back, and the bed next to mine stayed empty. At least one thing had gone right for me in this insurmountable shitstorm. I might have been caged up in a hospital with a diseased liver, but I still didn't have to live with nothing but a curtain separating me from a total stranger who could have been watching me sleep for all I knew. Visiting hours had ended at ten, and both Mikasa and my dad had gone home. Despite the fact that I usually don't care all that much about being alone, I was lonely. And on the rare occasions that I actually do get lonely, I have a hard time getting any sleep.

Needless to say, the sensation of white fluorescent lights casting their agonizing glow on my eyelids was not pleasant.

I pried my eyes open, squinting against the blinding light. A dull jolt of panic shot through my mind. For just a second, I'd forgotten where I was. Then that dull, heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach reminded me. Leukemia. Tumor. Hospital.

_Right. _I let out a discontented groan and reached up to rub at my eyes.

"Hey. Sorry about that. I sort of needed those on to readjust you."I blinked, trying to force my eyes to open. The light still burned, but it was just a little more tolerable now. I wriggled around under the thin, papery sheets and tried to make myself sit up against the pillows. I was already halfway up before my eyes decided they could handle the sudden light adjustment.

The mechanized popping sound of the flow control on my IV drip broke the relative silence in the room. I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and turned towards the collection of machines at the side of my bed. "Wha? Who's..."

I fell silent in mid-sentence. Standing by the IV dispenser, pressing commands into the little plastic button panel and dressed in spotless mint-green scrubs, was... someone.

I didn't know who, or what. He was just someone.

I blinked. I didn't know what he was doing there. I hadn't ever seen him around the hospital before. He seemed pretty young, maybe only a few years older than myself.

He pressed one last button and the IV dispenser chimed in response. "Okay. That's done..." He threw a quick glance at the other machinery and turned. Suddenly his eyes were on me.

Holy shit. Grey. I had never seen anything so grey in my entire life.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

I took a deep breath and coughed up a single sentence. "Who are you?"

He blinked, dulling the feeling of razor wire spearing through my flesh where his eyes made contact with mine. "Oh, right," he said. "You were passed out when I came in to check on you earlier."

"I was asleep?" I croaked. It certainly didn't feel like it.

The guy let out a soft, breathy noise that could have been a laugh, but I wasn't sure. "Asleep doesn't even cut it. Your monitors were the only reason why people knew you weren't dead."

I rubbed at my eyes again. "What time is it?"

"A little after eight," he responded. "There's a digital clock above the TV in the corner, if you'd bothered looking."

I looked. He was right. For some reason I suddenly felt stupid. "How long was I out?"

"Probably a few hours. Don't worry. Passing out for an extended period of time is completely normal."

"What?" I mumbled.

"You heard me," he replied. "There's even a name for it. It's called sleep."

I sighed heavily and turned back to the stranger by my bed. "Ha. You're hilarious."

He didn't respond. He just glanced at my patient file hanging up on the wall. "Looks like everything's in order here," he said matter-of-factly. "See you in an hour."

"Wait."

The guy froze, his fingertips just barely brushing the door handle. He spun around to face me. "What is it?"

I had to force myself upright before I could speak. It felt weird talking to him while lying down in bed, for some reason. "You never answered me before."

"Right. What were you asking?"

"Who you are."

"Oh," he said with a casual nod. "My name's Levi Ackerman, LPN. I'm your nurse. They assigned me to you first thing this morning."

"Oh. Okay." So he was the one who'd be taking care of me for the next however long I happened to be staying in Trost. That explained why he'd been messing with my IV. He was an LPN. Just a practical assistant. It was probably his first shift here or something. That was why I'd never seen him before.

With a silent nod, Levi turned away again and swung the door open. As he walked out, he reached for the lightswitch. The room went dark again. The door closed. And just like that, he was gone, disappearing just as suddenly as he'd shown up.

* * *

><p>The next day, Levi came in to readjust me for the twentieth time since the first morning.<p>

"You've been scheduled for radiation at ten today," he said.

"Ten?" I murmured absentmindedly, the haze of sleep still hanging over me from a few minutes before. I glanced at the clock. My eyes widened. "That's in less than an hour!"

"I know," he replied. "Thank god you actually woke up at a reasonable time this morning."

I looked over at him, expecting there to be a teasing smirk on his face like there usually was with Mikasa whenever she said things like that. But the expression wasn't there. His face hadn't changed in the least. He just looked indifferent, unamused, maybe even a little bored, exactly the way he did every other time I'd seen him.

I shivered internally. That expression was really starting to creep me out.

"Yeah," I groaned in response. "Because why would I want to miss lying down in a deafening noise pod and getting bombarded with gamma rays?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who has an infected liver," Levi snapped. "As far as I know, this could wind up saving your life. So why don't you just shut up and focus on getting better?"

I raised my eyebrows. "Well that's new."

"What's new?"

"Never had a nurse snap at me before," I said flatly.

Levi sighed. "Oh," he said. "It happens. I've been trying to keep my mouth shut more often. Dr. Erwin's gone after me about it before, but you know what they say. Old habits die hard. You might as well get used to it."

I shuffled around with my sheets and swung my legs over the side of the bed. "Wow. And I thought nurses were supposed to be nice."

"Well, I guess that makes me no ordinary nurse, then."

I inhaled sharply through my teeth as my bare feet hit the cold linoleum floor. I may or may not have murmured something under my breath about women's professions.

Levi's head spun around and his eyes latched onto me. "What was that?"

"N-nothing," I stuttered.

"No, it was definitely something."

I rolled my eyes and let out a heavy sigh. "I said... I thought that most nurses were women, too."

I wasn't trying to piss him off. I was serious. Every nurse I've ever had before him had _actually_ been a woman. Of course, I didn't have time to point that out before he fired his response straight back at my face.

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize that my job was gender-restricted."I felt a hot, embarrassed blush flooding up to my face. "W-wait, that's not what I-"

"Then what?" he quipped, staring up at me with his hands on his hips.

Staring _up_ at me.

I stifled a laugh.

Levi gritted his teeth and exhaled, slow and heavy. "What now?"

I bit my lip and suppressed a smile. "You are really short."

Something about that bored, impassive look on his face changed. It was harder, steelier, suddenly about eighty times as dangerous as usual. He let out a soft, breathy almost-laugh, his razor-sharp eyes tearing holes into mine. "Yes. I'm short. Five-foot-three, to be exact. And your point is?"

"N-nothing, just... I never realized it before."

The psychotic version of his normal expression on his face quickly receded back to its regular level of scariness. "I didn't think so," he said. He unplugged my IV dispenser from the wall and switched the power source to battery charge. "We should probably be getting you down to the treatment center. You wouldn't want to be late."

I reached out to take the rolling dispenser from him. "Whatever you say, nurseman," I said with a smirk as I pushed it towards the door.

"Hey. Watch it, brat," Levi snapped, shutting the door behind us.

* * *

><p>"Hey. I brought that in half an hour ago. Aren't you going to eat it?"<p>

It was my fifth day in the hospital. Everything sucked so far. The second day, I was given my first dose of radiation, the first session in total of fourteen I would have over the course of that summer. I was given a break on the third day, given an extra-intensive session on the fourth, then left to my own devices for a while. I was sent in for another that morning, then another was scheduled for later in the afternoon with the promise of another break the next day. Dr. Erwin told me I'd have a screening at the end of my first week to see if the treatments were making any progress. I wasn't sure that they would. The rock hanging around in my ribcage was giving me a bad feeling.

I glanced over my shoulder towards the sound of the voice that I'd learned to recognize. Levi was standing in the doorway of my room, tapping his fingertips impatiently against a plastic clipboard, the same one printed with patient information that he always carried around. His piercing grey eyes were fixed on me. My gaze drifted from him to the untouched tray of microwaved food on the rolling table by my bed.

"I wasn't hungry," I said.

It wasn't a total lie. I was still having a hard time keeping food down, especially food as bland and shitty as what they served the overnight patients. I couldn't eat normally if I tried. But even the threat of projectile vomit didn't keep me from feeling the painful clawing in the pit of my stomach that generally comes with avoiding food at all costs.

Levi didn't seem to believe me. "Look," he deadpanned, "I know it's not exactly gourmet, but you have to eat something sometime. You're in a hospital. The staff won't hesitate to tube-feed you if that's what it comes to."

I shifted around on the bed to face him. "That's not it."

The clipboard tapping stopped. "Then what is it?"

I bit my lip and breathed in before murmuring, "I just don't want to throw up again."

I didn't think he'd heard me. The look that suddenly filtered onto his face said otherwise. "You're still having problems with that?"

I swallowed (which was just about all I was able to do) and nodded. "Yeah."

"I thought so." Levi glanced at the watch on his left wrist. He always had it there. At least he always did when he was working his shift. I'd never seen him without it. A second later, he looked back up at me. "Okay. I'll give you some advice. There's a certain trick to it. Have you tried eating small amounts at intervals?"

"Wait, don't you have other-" I suddenly found myself asking.

"The floor's pretty calm right now, actually," Levi said, cutting me off mid-sentence. "I think I've got a few minutes." Well, that was new. His packed schedule was something that he hadn't hesitated to remind me of before.

"Oh," I said. "Um... well, I've tried doing that before, but I really don't think they'd accommodate it here. You know, the schedule and everything."

"They could if you told someone you needed it," Levi said flatly, as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world.

"Well, I'd thought about doing that, but I just didn't want to make a big de-"

"Okay, I'm just going to stop you right there," Levi snapped, cutting me off for the second time. "First of all, no. There is no set schedule for patient meals, and even if there was, do you really think that everyone in the hospital could adhere to it? Second of all, this is a hospital, for fuck's sake. Accommodating patients is what we're supposed to do. And finally, do not ever tell me you don't want to make a big deal about anything. There are no heroes allowed around here. In fact, you probably should have made a bigger deal about the constant vomiting than you did."

I stared at him, eyes wide. I think that was the first time I'd ever heard a nurse intentionally swear in front of me.

"Wait. How did you know about the-"

"Oh, come on, brat. It wasn't that hard to tell. Your bathroom's been smelling like stomach acid ever since you got here." He wrinkled his nose. "I really wish the janitor would do a better job of cleaning it up."

I felt a humiliated blush rising to my face. Why did he always seem to do that to me?

"Well, it's not exactly something I have a choice about."

"Really? Because it could be, it you went about it the right way," Levi said. He left his clipboard in the holder by the door and made his way over to my bed. He leaned over and looked at my tray, which I hadn't even started picking at yet. It was reheated chicken nuggets, surrounded by a few other food-like substances that I knew better than to bother trying to choke down. Admittedly, it wasn't the worst thing they had tried to serve me, but I still wasn't interested.

"Hm," Levi murmured, resting his hands on the edge of my bed. "And this is normally what the other patients actually manage to eat."

"Yeah, well, you could get me takeout from a freaking five-star restaurant and I still wouldn't be able to eat it."

"Just start picking at it and stop whenever you feel like you need to. That's all you can do, really."

"Okay." I picked up one of the nuggets and bit down on the breading. It was lukewarm and kind of soggy, probably because it had been sitting on that tray for the past half hour. But it wasn't quite vomit-inducing. Not yet, anyway.

"Hey, Eren?"

"Yeah?"

"I haven't had my lunch break yet, so if you wouldn't mind..." Levi glanced down at the tray of nuggets.

"Go ahead," I mumbled around processed chicken. "I'm not going to finish it."

"Thanks." He grabbed one of the nuggets from the tray and ripped it in half between his teeth. Neither of us said anything for a while, Levi enjoying my would-be lunch and me focusing on keeping my food where it was supposed to be. He glanced over at me and nodded his head to the side.

"Hm?" I mumbled.

"Scoot. I want to sit down."

I did as he said and shifted over a few inches. Levi turned and settled down at the foot of the bed. "So," he said, keeping his eyes away from mine for once.

"So?" I responded.

He shrugged. "I don't know."

I breathed out and picked up another nugget off of the tray. "Are you new here?"

"Yeah, actually," Levi answered. "I just finished my training program in May. I've only been working here for a few weeks. Don't freak out or anything, though. I aced the exam, and I'm fully qualified. You're not even my first patient."

I couldn't help smiling. "Good to know I'm not a guinea pig."

"So what about you?"

I swallowed and glanced over at him. "What about me?"

Levi shrugged again. "I don't know. Anything about you."

"Okay," I said, digging through my brain for something interesting to tell him. Other than the whole terminal disease thing, my life in and of itself was actually pretty boring. "I'm not a fully qualified anything, and I haven't taken a standardized exam in maybe a year and a half."

"Why's that?"

"I'm homeschooled," I said flatly. "My dad withdrew me a few months into my freshman year. I mean, I'm still learning at a sophomore level, training for the SATs and stuff, but it's just... there's really no way to gage anything anymore. I take online classes. I don't get a summer vacation. I've also got a tutor who basically just visits my house and teaches me as often as he can. So everything's a little scattered. I've been using Mikasa as a way to tell whether I'm in the right place with my work and everything."

"Mikasa?"

"My sister."

"So that's who that girl is."

Mind you, Mikasa had come in to visit me every afternoon by going out to the library and snagging a ride to Trost from one of the Signashina High volunteers with a license. My sister had something of a knack for making connections.

"She has the same last name as me," Levi mentioned. "It's kind of weird."

"Yeah. She was already nine by the time my family adopted her, and she was used to being referred to using her old name, so she just kept it."

Levi nodded, then things went quiet. He broke the silence again a minute later.

"So why did your dad withdraw you from school?"

"I was missing too many days. You know. Cancer stuff."

Suddenly I felt an unsteady twist in my guts. I dropped whatever was left of my current nugget back on the tray.

Levi glanced over at me. "Done already?"

I nodded. The queasy feeling in my stomach slowly began to subside. So did the empty clawing sensation that had been bothering me for the past three days.

"Well, at least you've managed to eat a little something." He stood up, the bed dipping in my direction without his weight to even it out. He picked up the half-empty tray on the rolling table. "I've got to go. There's a little kid in the next ward over with the flu and a suppressed immune system who needs his temperature taken."

"Okay," I said, burying my legs back under the blanket. "See you later, then."

"See you later," he echoed, picking up his clipboard on the way out. "I'll bring you something to eat later. It'll be from the cafe downstairs. If it'll quiet your guts down, I think we can hold off on the cardboard food until tomorrow."

I watched the door swing shut behind him and stared at it long after he had disappeared out into the hallway. A strange, numb emotion was swirling around in my head. I couldn't find the words to describe what I was feeling. I probably would have called it confused, if anyone had asked. But I that didn't even come close to what it really was.

This was my nurse. My nurse who didn't seem to care much about anything. My nurse who called me a brat every time he saw me. My withdrawn, bossy, easily-offended nurse who was kind of sensitive about his height and snapped at me for pointing it out _once_.

And he was treating me to decent food.

Confused didn't even cut it.

* * *

><p>Mikasa came in for her seventh visit a few days later.<p>

"So how much have they done so far?"

"A shitload of radiation sessions and another scan," I answered.

She raised her eyebrows. "Wow. And nothing's changed?"

I shook my head. "Nope. The images they got didn't show any change with the tumor. If they did, Dr. Handsome said I might be able to leave in as little as two weeks, but that didn't happen, so..." I shrugged. "It looks like I'm going to be stuck here for a long time."

Mikasa frowned. "That sucks."

"Leukemia sucks. These are just the side effects."

"They still suck, though," she mumbled, kicking her flip flops off and watching them hit the floor. She turned and fixed her dark eyes on me. "We miss you at home, Eren." She paused before adding, "Well, I miss you, anyway."

"What about dad?" I dared to ask.

"He's been working a lot," Mikasa said, dropping her eyes back to her flip flops. "He kind of tends to do that when he's upset about something. So I guess that means he misses you too."

"I guess," I murmured, shifting around on the hospital bed where I'd spent the past week plus one day of the summer. So. Dad was working a lot. I didn't know why she even bothered telling me. That wasn't news to any of us.

"I can't believe you're stuck in this hellhole again," Mikasa said. She flopped back on the mattress, swinging her legs over the edge. "When was the last time you had an actual summer?"

I sighed. The rock in my ribcage suddenly felt heavier. "That's what I've been asking myself lately."

At that moment, the latch clicked on the door to my room.

"Don't mind me. Just doing my job here."

Levi shuffled into the room and went about adjusting my IV drip, the same as he'd been doing every hour for nearly a week. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, his sharp grey eyes registering the girl next to me on my bed. "Oh. Didn't know you had a visitor."

"It's just Mikasa again," I said, nodding casually towards my sister. "She got here a little bit after you last came in."

"Hey," Mikasa mumbled. Her face looked like it was competing with Levi's for absolute expressionlessness.

Levi, of course, remained the reigning champion. "I remember you. You've been coming in during visiting hours almost every day this week. Didn't really get a chance to talk to you, though."

Mikasa tucked her legs under her. "Did you want to?"

"Not particularly," Levi said flatly. He turned away and focused on my monitors in the corner.

Mikasa blinked, her eyes widening just the slightest bit. Something had her interested.

"Yeah, so, this is the nurse I was telling you about last time," I said, trying to keep the room from falling into an awkward silence. "Levi. Remember?"

Mikasa nodded. "Yeah. I do." Her eyes didn't move an inch.

"So what do you think? Was I accurate?"

"Accurate about what?" Levi said over his shoulder. He glanced back at us. Mikasa suddenly pretended to be very interested in the charity garden outside my window.

"My description of you."

"Which was..." he said, trailing off and leaving an expectant blank space at the end. He looked intently at Mikasa.

My sister brought her attention back to us and smirked. "Nothing out of the ordinary," she said. "Eren complains about his nurses all the time."

I turned towards her, my mouth dropping open and my eyes wide. "Mikasa!"

"Lovely," Levi deadpanned, scribbling something down on his clipboard.

I sighed internally. "So..." I said, trying to keep the conversation going. Levi seemed to have lost interest. Mikasa was once again either fascinated by something over Levi's shoulder or...

Holy shit, she was checking out my nurse.

"So, you're still no closer to dying than you were when you got here," Levi said. "I think you'll survive just fine until I come back to check on you again. Don't get too crazy while I'm gone, kids. And remember to use protection," he said as he slipped out the door.

"Levi, she's my sis-" I started, but the door slammed shut before I could finish.

A second later, I heard a soft, breathy scoff next to my ear.

"That's the bitchy nurse you told me about last time?"

I turned to look at Mikasa. Her eyebrows were raised, a steely glint in her charcoal-black eyes. "Yeah. What about him?"

"For once, he is actually as bitchy as you said he is."

I let out a short, sharp exhale. "Yeah. No kidding."

"He's still pretty hot, though."

My eyes went wide. "What?"

"Your nurse. Levi. He's hot," she said, as if I didn't know who she was talking about. She turned to me and tilted her head to the side. "Come on. All personality quirks aside, don't tell me you don't think so, too."

"Well... I..." I mumbled. I'd agreed with her on this sort of thing before. It wasn't anything new between us. I can't even count all the times I've let her gush about boys to me. She'd done the same for me, girlwise. I've never felt weird pointing out if I thought a guy was nice-looking. Finding someone attractive and actually being attracted to them are two entirely different things. Calling another guy hot was never uncomfortable for me. But for some reason, now that my nurse was involved, it suddenly was.

"Come on, Eren. Don't tell me you haven't noticed."

"Noticed what?" I asked, feeling more than a little bewildered. What did she see that I seemed to be missing?

"So you're telling me that you've been seeing this guy every other hour, every day for the past week and you haven't ever thought he was hot? Not even once?"

I let out a laugh that sounded more nervous than I would have liked. "Um... no?"

"Hm," Mikasa scoffed, her smirk faltering for a split second. "Well. I think he is."

"Why?"

"Don't really know. He's kind of got this... this eccentric charm to him. He's got some pretty sexy hair. The shortness subtracts a few points. And the personality. Not many, though." She stopped for a second, nibbling at her lip. "And his arms. Have you even seen them? I mean, if you look up toned in a dictionary you'd probably get a picture of that."

"Well, I'm sorry I don't spend most of my time here staring at my nurse's arms," I said with a hollow laugh.

She grinned at me and punched me playfully in the shoulder. "Ha. Homophobe."

"But seriously. What's with the nursely fangirling all of a sudden?"

"I'm not fangirling. He's still a dick. He just happens to be an attractive one."

I laughed again. "Yeah. Whatever you say."

Mikasa left after three hours. Levi dropped in once and we all did our best to ignore each other. The next time he came in, she was gone.

"Had fun with Mikasa, I'm guessing?" he asked as he tapped buttons on my monitors.

I made a disgusted face behind his back. "Depends on the context."

"The context?" Levi spun around, his face coming out of its expressionless phase for just a moment and twisting up almost to match mine. "Ugh. That's not what I meant at all. Jesus, brat, get your mind out of the gutter."

"Hey. It's not my fault you don't know how to word a question," I retorted, throwing my hands out to the side in a you-started-it gesture.

Levi sighed. He seemed to do that a lot. "Whatever, Immature Irving."

"Excuse me, it's Eren Jaeger-bom-bastic," I tossed back, enunciating every syllable and shooting them at him like Nerf darts. "Get it right."

Levi glanced over his shoulder and stuck his tongue out at me. "Shut up."

I snorted to myself and looked away from him. _And you're calling me the immature one._

As Levi turned away to finish up readjusting my saline drip, I glanced back at him. And then the glancing turned into staring. My eyes somehow wound up wandering to his arms. I remembered what Mikasa has said earlier. Her words echoed in my head.

_Have you even seen them? I mean, if you look up toned in a dictionary you'd probably get a picture of that._

I blinked in surprise. She was right. They totally were.

* * *

><p>That first week was the last healthy one I would have for a long time. After that, things started to go downhill fast.<p>

The second week was the same as the first. Radiation, day after day. A break every now and again to keep me from getting gamma poisoning or whatever else might go wrong if the doctors went too crazy. Then, at the end of the second week, there was another scan. The results were almost exactly the same. The radiation didn't seem to have done anything but leave dry, scaly patches all over my skin. The useless accumulation of cells in my liver hadn't shrunken in the least since I had first checked in. Dr. Erwin decided to step up his game and started administering chemotherapy in alternation with everything else. So, naturally, this brought on symptoms of its own, ones which were worse than any problems my liver had given me so far. Within a few days, I was vomiting again, my hair had started falling out and the drugs in my system had started to give me migraines.

But, of course, the tumor wasn't giving in to that, either.

Two weeks turned into three. July eventually became August. The dull weight in the pit of my ribcage seemed to grow heavier with each passing day. Then the weight turned into all-out pain. I was spending every second of every day walking around feeling as if someone had just punched me. I could feel on my own that my condition was getting worse. I didn't need the scan results from Dr. Erwin telling me two more times that my tumor wasn't shrinking, no matter what he put me through to force it into submission.

All through the torturous weeks, Mikasa kept visiting me.

I don't know what my dad was doing the entire time. Working, probably. It seemed that all he ever had time to do was drive Mikasa around when she bothered him enough. The only time I ever saw him was once or twice while he was coming in to drop Mikasa off or take her home again. And even then we didn't say much. Mainly because there was nothing to say. At least nothing that we didn't know already. I was sick. I was getting worse. My tumor absolutely refused to shrink. No one knew where things would be headed next, or if I would be okay in the end or not.

* * *

><p>Five and a half weeks in, Mikasa stayed through one of my chemotherapy sessions.<p>

I still had the PICC lines stuck into both my arms, even though the assortment of IV drips I'd been plugged into a few minutes earlier were gone. The plastic tubes felt weird, being stuck so far into my veins, but they were there for a reason. As far as I knew, they'd be staying there until I either died or left. My brain was already starting to pound from the side effects. I ran a hand over the curve of my aching skull. My hair was getting so thin. I'd asked Mikasa to bring a razor in one of these days and hack off whatever was left before I started looking stupid.

I heard the muffled tap of broken-in Converse before my door swung open and Mikasa walked in, carrying a big hospital-issue plastic container with her. She pushed it into my lap before jumping up onto the bed next to me.

"I'm betting it won't be five minutes before you toss your cookies," she said.

"Shut up," I growled, clutching the container to my chest. "You're disgusting."

Even as I said the words, I was choking back a lethal bout of nausea. I tried to cover it up, but I could already feel my stomach churning uneasily. I bit down on my tongue, determined to keep the tiny amount of hospital food I'd eaten a few hours earlier in its place. But, knowing the current state of my digestive system, that wasn't likely to happen.

"Yeah, well, it's gonna happen, whether you like it or not," she shot back, folding her legs up on the edge of the mattress.

I sighed and forced myself to swallow. "As if I need you to remind me."

The door of my room swung open again without so much as a knock. It was Levi. I couldn't help the wave of relief that washed over me at seeing him. He'd been the one to disconnect me from the ungodly chemicals that had been draining into my bloodstream a few minutes earlier. I'd never been happier to be taken off an IV in my life. Well, other than the last time I'd been given chemo. But that was a long time ago. Fresher pain is always worse.

"Hey, brat," he said. "You still doing alright so far?"

I kept my mouth shut and nodded. The painful twisting inside me was getting worse. I felt like if I tried to speak, something other than words might come up.

Levi sighed and pursed his lips together. "You know, there's no shame in side effects. Everyone has them. It's not like seeing you vomit is anything new to me."

Mikasa held her hands up like a choir singer. "Testify," she said in the worst southern accent I'd ever heard.

"What, so now you're encouraging me to puke my guts out?" I snarled, my hands tightening on the container.

"No," Mikasa said. "Just pointing out that you don't have to power through your symptoms or anythi-"

My stomach lurched and half-digested food came spilling out of my mouth before she had even finished her sentence.

I felt my sister place her hand on my back. "Hey. Easy, there," she said softly to me as I continued to cough and choke. It didn't stop until there was nothing but thin, bitter liquid welling up in the back of my throat. My body still shuddered as if it expected something more to come up. Mikasa ran her hand in small circles over my shoulder blades. "That's it. Breathe. Just breathe."

I coughed a few more times before the dry-heaving finally stopped and I was able to sit up. "Jesus fucking..."

"Here," a voice said. I looked up to see a hand outstretched in front of me, its fingers clutching a wad of wet paper towels. My eyes traveled up and landed on Levi's calm face.

"Thanks," I mumbled, taking the towels from him and swiping vigorously at my bile-stained mouth. He stood back before turning and disappearing into the small bathroom door. He came back with twice as many paper towels, one handful soaked with cold water and the other dry.

"Take these. You need them," he commanded. I looked at the backhandedly offered towels, then at the acid-stained ones in my hands, then back up at Levi.

"Just drop those in the vomit holder. It's not like you're going to need them anymore."

I did as I was told, then continued to clean myself up with the new paper towels he'd given me. I tossed those in the container as well before drying myself off with the ones he'd left unmoistened. He snatched up the plastic container from the bed and slipped out of the room, holding it out in front of him as if it were on fire.

I stared after him, even after the door had slammed shut. Mikasa did the same.

"Wow," she said after a minute. "That was fast."

I shrugged. "It's normal. For him, anyway."

"Is he always such a clean freak?"

"Yes," I answered, sighing. He'd done the same thing every time I'd thrown up. It was as if he couldn't stand the sight of anything soiling my precious face.

Mikasa rifled through the bag of random crap she'd brought with her and fished out a pack of gum. She flicked it open and handed me a piece. I took it and crammed it gratefully into my mouth, happy to taste anything other than my own vomit.

"I guess it makes sense," Mikasa said while I worked the bitter aftertaste out of my mouth. "You know, the whole obsession with sanitation. He probably has to be that way. He is a nurse, after all."

"I know, but I've never had one _this obsessed_ with keeping me clean."

Mikasa laughed. "You sure it's just you he does this to?"

"Probably not," I replied, giving her a weak smile.

Levi came back, a fresh container tucked under one arm. He tossed it to me without even half the care Mikasa had used with the first one. "Feeling any better?" he asked.

I sucked on the gum in my mouth. I felt the pulsing migraine starting to build up in the back of my skull. Still I forced myself to smile again. "A little."

His eyes fixed on me for a second, then flicked away. Something about that one tiny motion told me he knew I was lying. "Alright," he said, despite everything. "Then let me know if there's anything else you need. And you've got your friend there if you feel like throwing up again," he added, nodding at the container in my lap.

"Okay," I said quietly, shifting around on my bed. Another wave of pain pulsed outwards from the core of my brain. I gritted my teeth, squashing the gum between them. It wouldn't be long until the pain would start messing with my vision and making it hard to sit upright.

"Levi."

My nurse turned around, his fingers already resting on the door handle. "Yes?"

"Um... I..." I stuttered. I didn't know why I was hesitating. I just had to ask him for a favor. One favor. And then I wouldn't have to deal with the sensation of my skull splintering like an eggshell over the next two hours.

"What is it? Come on, brat, I don't have all day," Levi snipped impatiently.

Mikasa's hand squeezed my shoulder. I took a deep breath and asked. "Could you maybe bring me some Tylenol or something? I always get migraines after these things."

Levi blinked. "Oh. Sure. I'll be back in a minute."

With that, he slipped through the door and disappeared into the hallway.

I shifted my legs up from the side of the bed to lie back into my pillows. Mikasa flipped herself around and leaned back on the footboard. "Well, this is new," she remarked.

"What's new?"

"You. Actually asking for things when you need them."

"What do you mean?" I scoffed.

"I mean you always have a hard time asking for stuff. Even stupid things like that," she said, flicking her hand at the half-closed door. "You always try to fight through the symptoms by yourself. It's like you're trying to be a hero or something."

"What are you talking about?" I said, taking in a quick, hissing breath as another ache throbbed its way through my brain. "I'm not trying to be anything. I just... I don't want to make it a scene over it or anything. That's it."

She shifted around and dropped her gaze into the sheets. "You know, Mom was exactly the same way."

Wow. That stung. "Yeah. She was," I murmured.

Neither of us said anything for a while after that. The only thing to break the silence was the sound of Levi's voice drifting in from the hallway as he pushed the door open again.

"Okay. I hope you're not brand-specific, because all we have in stock here are generics," he explained. He dropped two unmarked white tablets into the palm of my hand. "Here, take these." He handed me one of those miniature 8-ounce water bottles and placed a small plastic bag on the rolling table. "I brought you two more doses, just in case those don't work or you need them later. Don't go taking them all at once, now," he added with a completely straight face.

I quickly slipped the two tablets onto my tongue and took a sip of water. My stomach immediately twisted up at the feeling of not being completely empty. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. I wasn't in the mood to puke again anytime soon.

"Thanks, Levi," I said, offering him a weak smile. He didn't return it. I hadn't expected him to.

"It's my job," he replied. "Just let me know if there's anything else you need. That little red button is on your TV remote for a reason, you know."

"Okay," I murmured again. Levi didn't say another word, only nodded. His eyes met mine, just for a second. I could almost hear his voice in my head saying _Well done, brat_. Then he walked back out into the hallway.

Mikasa waited the door swing shut before turning back to me. "I knew something else was up. Now are you actually feeling better?" she asked.

I smiled. "For once, I actually am."

* * *

><p>That last comment didn't hold true for very long.<p>

I think that the chemotherapy did a lot more harm than good. Even more weeks were wasted in the hospital, Dr. Erwin and his staff shooting me up with chemicals and radiation, then sending me into radiology for scan after scan after scan. It turned into a cycle, a vicious one that didn't seem to have an end. The tumor started to shrink, then grew back, then shrank again, then spread past its former boundaries before receding back to its original size. My condition got worse. My inability to eat correctly finally got to me, and I started losing weight again. My hair was gone. The chemo side effects tortured me on a daily basis. Fluid started building up under my skin, which had long since turned yellow and jaundiced. So had my eyes. Every time I looked in the mirror, I felt like I was looking at a rotting corpse.

Mikasa still came in to visit me every day. She never said it to my face, but I knew it was because she was worried. She always acted a little differently when I was really sick. She'd stopped punching me in the arm, wasn't poking fun at me nearly as much, and a billion other tiny quirks that no one would have noticed but me. My dad, on the other hand, I barely ever saw. I wasn't surprised. If I were him, I wouldn't have wanted to see me, either.

And I was putting up with Levi and his bullshit through all of it.

I don't know if he treated any of his other patients the way he treated me. In all of the three years I had been dealing with my cancer, I had never had a nurse who had snapped at me, sassed me, cracked jokes about me to my face and swore in my presence even half as much as Levi did. I was surprised no one had complained about him. But I had the feeling that Dr. Erwin had hired him fresh out of training for a reason. Maybe he just kept him around because he was good at what he did. In spite of all the blatant insults and constant jabs about how I kept my hospital room, I was doing okay in Levi's hands.

I'd been in the hospital for more than six weeks when Dr. Erwin finally gave me the news.

My tumor wasn't shrinking enough for my symptoms to subside. He'd been trying to avoid going to invasive measures, but at that point it didn't look like he had any other choices. He would continue administering the treatments, just to see if he could get my tumor to recede again. As soon as that happened, I would be going into surgery. He would give it two more weeks. And if nothing happened, he would go through with it anyway.

A partial hepatectomy. That was what he had called it. I, on the other hand, had another name for it entirely.

I know this is going to come out later, so I'll just go ahead and say it now. I'm scared of surgery.

I'd only ever gone into surgery once before. It was a bone marrow transplant. I'd gotten it back when I had first been diagnosed and people still hoped that I would one day be free of this demonic disease. I was awake the whole time, and the entire thing was performed with needles. I wasn't cut open, wasn't put under and didn't wind up with any scars from the experience. I was given local anesthetic and everything, so I wouldn't feel needles the size of chopsticks getting stabbed into my flesh, but I was never, for lack of a better term, put to sleep. They said it was a surgical procedure, but I never counted it as one.

This was going to be different. I'd be lying out on a table. Totally unconscious. My stomach sliced open and all my insides exposed. Strangers poking around in them and cutting me into pieces...

The mere mention of my impending doom sent chills down my spine.

At least, different chills than the occasional nerve tremors from the chemotherapy.

Three days after the announcement, Levi was hanging around in my room. He'd done it before. Repeatedly. I didn't know why. He said he had a few free minutes before he had to tend to his next patient. I told him that I didn't see any reason for him to be hanging out with me, of all the people in the hospital.

"Simple," he said. "You put up with me better than anyone else in this medical hellhole."

Oh. So that was why he bitched at me so much and hadn't been reported yet.

"I don't really think I have a choice," I responded. "You know, since you've been taking care of me this entire time and everything." I shifted around in my bed, trying to find a comfortable position. Nothing was comfortable as long as I had that stupid tumor sitting in my liver like a cluster of buckshot.

"Actually, you do."

My gaze ripped away from the FRIENDS rerun we'd been watching and latched onto Levi. "What?"

He looked back at me, his eyes cool like drops of glass. "If I was giving you any trouble, you could have asked the administration to assign you someone else. It's a regulation policy. Because we value our patients that fucking much."

"I... I didn't know that," I stammered.

Levi let out a sharp laugh. "You've been going here for how long, and you didn't know that?"

"No."

It was a lie. I had known about the policy the entire time. I just never saw any point in actually taking advantage of it. Besides, getting rid of Levi meant dumping him on some other helpless patient. I wasn't too enthusiastic about that idea.

"Well, I'm glad you didn't," he said. "If you'd gotten rid of me, then I wouldn't have had anyone to bitch at anymore." He turned back towards the TV. If I hadn't been hallucinating from the chemo side effects, I might have thought there were the faintest traces of a smile on his face.

We sat there in silence for a few more minutes, listening to Rachel talk about her horrible love life before Levi's pager interrupted and he had to go patch up some kid's broken stitches. Before he left, he stopped in the doorway and turned back to me.

"Let me know how the episode ends, okay?" he said.

I cocked my head to the side, confused. "But I thought you'd already seen the entire series."

He rolled his eyes and sighed. "Does it matter? Honestly, brat, you can't expect me to remember the exact plot of every episode. Especially when there are at least thirty with the same theme," he replied, nodding towards the TV.

"Okay. I'll tell you later," I said, giving him a weak smile. As usual, he didn't return it.

"See you."

"See you."

With that, Levi slipped outside and closed the door behind him. I turned away from the door and tried to focus my attention on the FRIENDS episode and remember where the hell I'd left off. But for some reason, I couldn't. I just stared at blankly at the screen, not entirely aware of what was going on. All I could think about was how unexpectedly empty the room felt. How everything seemed so quiet and lonely all of a sudden.

Something in me wished Levi was still there.

* * *

><p>Dr. Erwin scanned me again five days later. The tumor had shrunk again.<p>

My worst fears were about to be realized.

Mikasa had come in to visit me the day before it happened. She wouldn't be able to come back for a while afterwards. My dad hadn't let her get a summer job, so she'd found other things to keep herself busy. One of them happened to be a seven-day wildlife survival camp in the mountains upstate. She'd be staying for the last few dregs of August before school started again. And, conveniently, had her first day scheduled right before my surgery.

"So, Dr. Handsome is gonna be cutting you open, huh?" she said to me from the other end of my hospital bed.

I shuddered. "Wow, Mikasa, it sounds _so_ much more pleasant when you put it like that."

Mikasa only smirked. "Don't worry about it. He's a doctor, Eren. He knows what he's doing. What's the worst that could happen?"

"You know what the worst that can happen is," I said.

Mikasa's smirk disappeared. She stared into my eyes, and I stared gravely back. She quickly realized that her last sentence was probably the worst thing she could have possibly said to me.

"I'm sorry," she murmured.

"It's okay," I responded just as softly.

"No, that was insensitive. I wasn't thinking..."

"You shouldn't have had to think. You were right. I shouldn't be so nervous. I just..." I trailed off, unable to find a way to finish my thoughts.

Mikasa reached out and placed her hand on my small, bony ankle. "You're scared, aren't you?"

I nodded. There really wasn't much more to it than that.

My sister dropped her gaze to the sheets for a second, then brought it back up to me. She leaned forward on her knees and wrapped her arms around my skeletal shoulders. I returned the hug without a second thought, reveling in the feeling of human contact and her silky black hair against my bare scalp. She'd chopped it off a week earlier and turned it into a spiky little pixie cut. She always got her hair cut whenever I lost mine.

"You'll be okay, Eren," she whispered. "It's going to be okay."

I bit my lip, trying to ignore the feeling of tears stabbing at the corners of my eyes. "How do you know that?" I asked before I could stop myself.

"Because I do. You'll see," she replied. She released me, then sat back on her heels and smiled. I tried my best to do the same.

"Do you really have to leave?" I asked like a forlorn preschooler.

"Yeah," she said with a shrug. "If I'd known this was going to happen, I never would have signed up for that stupid camp, but..." She looked at me and shrugged again.

"I'll miss you, Mikasa."

"I'll miss you, too," she replied. "But remember to call me before you go into surgery. Then we'll facetime or something afterwards. You better not forget."

I couldn't help letting out a nervous laugh. "Okay, chief."

* * *

><p>The day of the surgery came long before I was prepared for it.<p>

I was lying alone in my room. The space was deathly quiet, save for the constant hum from my monitors and the saline drip dispenser that would soon be replaced with anesthetic. The guardrails that up until that point had been folded under the mattress of my bed had been pulled up and locked into place. The wheels all had their brakes off and were ready to be rolled out into the hallway and towards the operating room.

As I lay still in my bed, I could hear my blood rushing in my ears. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel it pulsing inside my chest. In less than an hour, I'd be going into surgery.

And I was absolutely terrified.

I shifted around under the blankets for the six hundredth time. There wasn't really much else to do. I wished someone were here. I wished that I had someone to talk to, to distract me from the traumatizing thoughts rushing through my head, to let me know that I was going to be okay and I wasn't alone.

I wished I had Mikasa.

But she wasn't there. She was at camp, learning how to build fires and fight bears and whatever the fuck else.

So I was alone. Not like that had never happened before.

I glanced over at the plastic tv remote hanging over the edge of my bedframe. Maybe if I turned the tv on it would help to drown out the deafening voices in my head telling me over and over that I was going to die. My arm twitched on top of the blanket. I needed something, anything to make the horrible thoughts stop.

My eyes suddenly switched their focus from the power button to the little red circle just above it.

The call button.

I thought about pressing it.

I looked away. No. It was a terrible idea. I would just have to suck it up and keep waiting.

I looked back at the button. I couldn't suck it up. I was panicking. I needed help. I couldn't do this on my own.

I thought of Mikasa again. She'd been the only one to visit me during this entire hellish experience. She was the only one who could have helped me. But now she was gone. Right when I needed her most, she was so conveniently unavailable.

The only other person who could come even close to doing what Mikasa did for me was...

Was...

I pressed the call button and immediately regretted it.

A moment later, the door of my room swung open. Levi strode in, his face expressionless as usual. "Hey, brat," he said. Strangely enough, the derogative term didn't seem so insulting anymore. "Dying already?"

I forced a nervous laugh past my lips. "N-no."

"Oh. What a shame." He came closer, then stopped, his muscular arms crossed over his chest. He gave me a quick once-over with his steely grey eyes. "No Mikasa today, huh?"

"No. She's at camp." I couldn't help the low, barely-even-out-loud growl that came afterward. "The selfish bitch."

"That's unfortunate," he said, an amused lilt in his voice. He must have heard me. "So what's wrong, then?"

"U-um..." I stammered. What was wrong? "N-nothing, I guess."

The amusement flickered out as if someone had flipped a switch. "Nothing? Then what the hell did you call me in here for?"

"I..." I was skating on thin ice. I couldn't tell him. He wouldn't care. He would laugh. He would call me a pussy and tell me to get over it. Going to him for moral support was like asking to get slapped in the face. Why the fuck did I press that stupid call button?

"Well?"

"...No reason, I guess."

Levi raised his eyebrows. "Seriously? I have eight other patients that I could be tending to and you just decide to call me in here on a fucking whim?"

"No, I just..."

"You just what?" His eyes were locked onto mine, his gaze burning straight into my soul.

I swallowed, digging my fingers into the blanket. "N-never mind," I murmured, tearing my eyes away from his. "You can go, if you want to."

I heard Levi let out a soft, whispery sigh. "You can be a real jackass sometimes, you know that, Eren?"

I looked back up at him. For once, he'd actually used my name. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you must think I'm stupid or something," he said. He took another step towards my bed. I had to fight the urge to scoot back. "This entire time you've been trying to power through your symptoms and play fucking hero or something. I mean, I've hardly heard a single word of complaint out of you this entire time. But now, all of a sudden, you've decided to use your call button and bring me in here? And you are actually fucking dense enough to tell me that there wasn't any reason for that?" He slowed down and took a breath, pressing a hand to his forehead and tangling his fingers in his hair.

I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off again. "Look, brat," he said. "I don't know why you pressed that button. But, if you have even the faintest idea of what it's meant for, you obviously had a reason for it. And if something is wrong enough for you to actually bother bringing me in here when there are probably about twelve other things I could be doing right now, it must be really,_ really_ wrong. So I just want to know one thing, Eren." There was my name again. I felt his steely grey eyes delving deep into my soul. It suddenly occurred to me why they call it eye _contact_.

"What. Is. Wrong?"

"I-I..." I choked, my voice barely above a whisper. I didn't want to say it. It was too stupid. Too embarrassing. But still... "I really can't..."

"Come on, Eren," Levi said, his voice soft and coaxing. "It's okay. You can tell me." I looked up at him. He'd never spoken to me that way before.

I bit my lip and sucked in a deep breath, then let it out, painfully slow. "I've never had a surgery before. And... I'm scared."

For the longest time, Levi didn't say a word. He just stood there, staring at me as if my cancer had suddenly spread to my face. He blinked, then the razor edge in his eyes started to soften.

"Oh," he murmured. "Okay."

My brain stuttered. I felt my heart do the same. I stared at Levi. He was moving closer, headed towards the chair next to my bed where Mikasa would occasionally sit when she didn't feel like cramming herself onto my bed. What was going on? What was Levi doing? Wasn't he supposed to be not caring and laughing in my face and calling me a pussy and telling me to get over it and everything else I'd been thinking of just a few seconds ago?

Levi settled down in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees and locking his fingers together in front of him. His eyes never left mine for even a second.

"What exactly are you scared of?" he asked.

"I... well, it's..." Wow. Now that I actually had the chance to tell someone what my problem was, I couldn't find the words to do it. I pushed myself just a little more upright against my pillows and twisted up the edge of the blanket between my fingers, then took a breath to try again. "It's about my mom."

Levi's face didn't change. His eyes stayed soft. "Your mom?"

"Yeah," I replied. "You see, this cancer, the leukemia... When I was ten, she was diagnosed with the same thing. And... she died of it. After a few months."

"So is it your cancer that you're scared of?"

"No, it's the surgery. It's definitely the surgery. You see, my mom had to go into surgery a few months after she was diagnosed. Our old doctor, Dr. Hannes, he hadn't caught her leukemia until it had already progressed. She was in stage four already. There was a growth in her spinal cord. They did all these screenings, and they said it was intramedullary or something and they couldn't operate without risking all this nerve damage, so they tried to treat it with radiation and chemo and everything, but..." My throat started to tighten up and forced me to stop. I reached up an ran a shaky hand over what should have been my hair.

"But nothing was working," I continued. "And before long, everything started to spread, then it was in her brain, but everything was still inoperable, and the treatments still weren't getting any responses, but they managed to get the tumor in her brain to shrink back a little, so they took her into surgery, just to give it a try, and..." My voice cracked, choking off the last few words of my story and forcing me to start again. "And she never came out. She died on the operating table."

The room fell into a silence almost as deep and consuming as the one that had been hanging in the air before Levi came in. I stared at him, and he stared straight back at me, his calculating gray eyes searching my face. Things still felt unfinished.

"S-so," I choked out, "that's why I'm scared. Because... my mom died in surgery, and I-I feel like... something's going to go wrong, and... and I'm not going to come back out..."

"Eren."

Levi's voice was so quiet it hardly even qualified as a whisper. I heard it all the same. I turned towards him, my eyes stinging. "Yeah?"

"I want you to listen to me, okay?" he said. His eyes caught mine and held them captive.

I nodded slowly, fighting back the tears my mom had brought up. "Okay."

"I know you're frightened," he murmured. "It's okay. This is your first surgery, and you have every right to be scared. But you shouldn't panic. Maybe your tumor hasn't responded to treatment as well as it could have. But it's still in a place where it can easily be removed without causing any serious damage. You're still alive, and as far as we can tell, you won't be dying anytime soon. The surgery is going to be fine. You're going to go into the operating room, we're going to anesthetize you and you aren't going to feel a thing until you wake up. And by then everything will be over. Your tumor will be gone, and you'll be able to go home once your symptoms clear up. You're going to be okay. Understand?"

I took a deep, shaky breath. "Y-Yes," I choked. Something that felt like a drop of acid slipped out from the corner of my eye and rolled over my cheek.

"Hey, don't be like that, okay?" Levi said, watching as another foreign object streaked a searing path over my face. He untwisted his fingers and placed one hand on the guardrail. "You're going to be fine. You'll make it through this."

"Are you sure?" I said, my voice rasping over the congealing lump in my throat.

"What kind of nurse would I be if I wasn't?" Levi answered. He gave me a small, encouraging smile. Yes. You heard me. Levi actually smiled.

I let my gaze fall away from his and sank back into the pillows on my bed. I'd have to remove them once Dr. Erwin and all the OR nurses came. My fingers still worried at the edge of the blanket, my palms cold and sweaty. My heart was still hammering against my ribs, threatening to punch a hole through my already-doomed liver. I was still scared. But it wasn't nearly so bad as it was before.

I glanced over at the guardrail. At Levi's hand, his strong, slender fingers draped over the cold metal.

Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed it.

Levi didn't act shocked. He didn't say anything or try to wrench his hand away from mine. He just let me take it, twisting my fingers around his and clutching them as if it would save my life. Still, he didn't move, not even when my shaking hand tightened so much on his that our fingers turned white. Not until we heard the latch click open and Dr. Erwin Smith came striding in, his entourage of OR nurses following closely behind.

Dr. Erwin looked at the both of us and raised his majestic eyebrows. "Am I interrupting something?"

"No, not at all" Levi said flatly. He twitched his fingers as if to say _You can let go now, Eren_. I didn't.

"Well, preparations in the operating room are almost finished. All that's left now is to bring in the patient," he said in that factual voice of his. "We'll just be administering a small dose of vicodin. Then we'll be good to go. How are you holding up, Eren?"

I choked down the lump in my throat and forced myself to answer. "Fine."

"Good," he said. One of the nurses stuck the end of a plastic syringe into an open port of my PICC line. A moment later, I felt like my skull was floating away from my spine. Suddenly everything in the room was the most hilarious thing I had ever seen in my life. I started to laugh uncontrollably, and my death grip on Levi's fingers finally came loose. He eased his hand away from mine and stood up.

"Feeling better?" he asked.

"Y-yes," I said, laughter bubbling up into my voice. "A lot."

"Good," he replied in almost the same tone that Dr. Erwin had used before. He began milling about the room with all the other nurses, unplugging my monitors and giving the loose wires to me, switching my IV dispenser to battery power and a million other small tasks that I couldn't be bothered to name. Dr. Erwin came back in while they were working and introduced me to the anesthesiologist and the surgeon who would be doing the majority of the cutting while Dr. Erwin directed. The pillows were cleared away from my bed, and I was told to lie on my back. Then the entourage of nurses organized themselves around the frame of my bed and began rolling me towards the door. I stared up at the ceiling as I was wheeled out into the hallway and began traveling towards the operating room.

The vicodin only did so much to calm down the raging torrent of trauma and misery in my head. I was still having visions of my lifeless body lying on the table, my skin split open like a cheap toothpaste tube, my guts spilling out, my monitor lines going flat...

"Almost there, Eren. You still doing alright?"

Levi's voice broke through the surface of my thoughts like a lifeguard reaching for a drowning victim. I blinked and strained my eyes to search for him. He was leaning over me, his dark hair pushed neatly into a surgery cap.

I nodded as much as I could while lying on my back. "I think so."

I watched as a line in the ceiling passed over us and the ceiling tiles changed. I heard the clear, mechanical blips of awaiting monitors. The smell of antibacterial cleaner was stronger than ever. My bed shuddered to a stop and one of the nurses tugged my blankets off of me. All of a sudden I knew exactly where we were.

Dr. Erwin leaned over me, a pale blue surgical mask over his mouth and nose. "Well, here we are," he said. "Are you ready,Eren?"

I tried to nod. I really wasn't feeling it anymore.

"Alright," Dr. Erwin responded. "I'm just going to need you to move over this way."

I strained my neck to look over my shoulder. My bed had been rolled up directly next to the operating table and the right guardrail snapped back into place. All of a sudden I felt the nurses' hands all over me, pushing me gently sideways, giving me small murmurs of encouragement as if they were trying to get a baby bird to fly. I rolled onto my elbows and began inching towards the operating table.

"Yes, that's it."

"Right there. There you go."

I dropped back down on the operating table and watched as my bed was rolled away into an empty corner. Suddenly I felt something long, thin and heavy fall across my legs. I looked down and the blips from my heart monitor began to speed up. It was a big, heavy strap, one that looked ominously like the ones used to bind mental patients to their beds.

"W-what is that for?" I demanded, my voice only slightly less than a panicky shriek.

"A regulation safety measure," Levi said. My eyes relaxed and I found myself staring up at his calm, collected face. There was a surgery mask over his mouth and nose as well, mint green, just like his scrubs. "Patients sometimes kick around in their sleep. Anesthesia isn't much different. We don't want you moving around during the surgery. That would be bad, no?"

"Yeah. It would." I wanted to laugh, but the anxiety throbbing in my chest wouldn't allow it. Another nurse straightened out one of my arms and secured it in place. Levi moved out of my field of vision for a second to secure my other arm to the operating table. I heard him talking to someone just to the left of my shoulder, standing next to my IV dispenser. The anesthesiologist, I guessed. When Levi came back, he was holding a clear plastic breathing mask.

"Alright, Eren," Levi said, reaching over me to pick something up from the other side of the table. He clicked it onto the open tube at the tip of the mask. "I'm going to put the mask on you now. This might feel a little weird, but don't panic. Just breathe normally, alright?"

"Okay," I said. My left arm was starting to go numb. I could already feel cold liquid draining into my veins. My heart kept stammering. It wouldn't be much longer now.

With one quick, fluid movement, Levi slid the mask over my mouth and nose and tightened the straps around my head. The overwhelming smell of sterilized plastic burned the inside of my nose. I felt cold gas seeping through the vent in the mask. The tube to the gaseous anesthetic draped itself over my shoulder.

Levi leaned over me, his eyes fixing themselves to mine. "Okay, Eren. I want you to count down from ten for me. Can you do that?"

"Yeah," I mumbled, the mask screwing with my ability to speak. I stared blankly up at Levi's face. The numbness in my arm was starting to spread. "Ten..."

Levi looked up at one of the other nurses and said something I couldn't understand. I started wondering if LPNs were qualified to work in the operating room.

"Nine..."

Someone in the operating room said something to either me or Levi. I wasn't sure who anymore. They sounded annoyed. Levi said something else. His words sounded even more slurred than before.

"Eight..."

I started wondering about his qualifications again. I kept searching my brain for that simple little fact that for some reason I wasn't able to find. Was Levi supposed to be in here? Was he?

"Seven..."

I didn't even hear what the invisible speaker said this time. But Levi heard it. He looked down at me. The room started going dark.

"Sixxxxnvmfhbnnjhrnjwfunl..."

"I'll see you later, Eren."

I never did make it to one.


	5. Bribery

**I might change the title of this chapter later on.**

**Hi. I'm back, and I promise this story is actually going to be going somewhere from this point onward. Also hopefully I'll be able to update a bit more often, since the other fic that I'm working on at the same time as this one is almost finished. I'm still writing this one, since it's taking a lot longer than I first thought it would. I had the first few chapters sitting around for a few months, though, so I've had a pretty good amount of time to get some sufficient editing done. Since is this story is turning out to be so damn long, I figured it might as well be adequately written.**

**Shameless self-promotion time.**

**If anyone even cares, my author blog is asking-appelia on tumblr, and I'm tracking the following tags for this story: fic: tmi, fic: tmiu, and fic: the monsters inside us. I figured the abbreviations might make things a little easier. Not that anything has shown up with these tags yet. Hardly anyone has even bothered leaving a review on this on either of the places I've posted it. But whatever. I can wait. We still have a LONG way to go.**

**I don't have anything else interesting to say. It's 11:11 at night. Well, there's something.**

**Story time.**

* * *

><p>"And that's just about it."<p>

The closing words of Levi's speech dragged me back into reality. I glanced around the room. The circle had been completely breezed through. Levi was sitting back down. I had missed his entire introduction.

_Dammit._

Hanji looked briefly around the circle. "Alright, looks like that's everyone," she chirped. "So, since it's our first meeting, I thought we wouldn't get into anything too heavy just yet..." She glanced at the clipboard in her lap. "I've got a few ice breakers planned out, just so everyone gets to know each other a little better."

A few unenthusiastic noises were issued from the circle, Jean in particular. Levi cut in, raising his voice above the complaints. "Also, we'll be getting food after this. You'll have to participate if you want any."

The noises stopped. Sasha's face brightened like a puppy's would if you held bacon over its head. I sighed and hunched over in my chair. As if the circle of self-deprecation hadn't been enough.

As it turned out, the ice breakers weren't anywhere near as bad as I thought. They weren't anything like the stupid multiplayer games and embarrassing group exercises I had come to connotate with the term "ice breakers." We'd just started off with Hanji asking us all sorts of weird questions off of a list on her clipboard and us having to come up with answers of the tops of our heads. I discovered that Sasha's favorite band was Five Seconds of Summer, Krista's favorite quote was from Dr. Seuss, Bertolt had been obsessed with giraffes as a child, and that if Reiner had a yacht he would call it the Armadillo Warrior. If Ymir had to be a flower she would be a tigerlily. Connie's favorite superhero was Deadpool. If Armin had to choose a fictional character to represent his personal philosophy, he would probably choose Haruhi Fujioka. Annie had once stalked an internet blogger for a week. Jean wanted to be a cat for 24 hours, and the weirdest fact about Marco was that he'd had so many surgeries, half the organs in his body either weren't there or weren't his own. Levi left the room after about fifteen minutes and came back with plastic bags looped over both his arms. He dropped them on the disregarded table in the corner and started undoing the packaging on the food inside. Everyone immediately abandoned their posts in the circle and swarmed around the table like a horde of starving piranhas.

I staggered up from my chair and started towards the table. I figured that if I was going to be stuck here, I may as well get some free food out of it. I grabbed a store-bought cookie from the plastic container before all the good ones were taken and oatmeal raisin was all that was left. Once I'd obtained my small victory, I turned around and leaned back against the table to watch everyone else socialize while I stayed here and waited for the hour-long session to be over.

Levi caught my eye before I could even start.

I don't know why I noticed him. He wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, just standing around and talking to Hanji with an absconded cookie in one hand. But still, for some strange reason, I found my eyes magnetically drawn to him. Suddenly everyone else in the room seemed to fade into the background. It was just me and Levi.

And Hanji, of course. You know, since he was talking to her. No one else, though.

I tore my eyes away from Levi for a second and did a quick sweep the room. Mikasa wasn't hovering over my shoulder anymore. I didn't know exactly where it was that she'd gone, but it didn't matter. As long as she was busy, she wouldn't be kicking me to start mixing with the crowd and talking to people. And that meant I could just stand alone and watch.

I looked back at him, wondering what he was talking to Hanji about. Only... there was no Hanji anymore. Levi was turning around. He was headed towards the table.

I quickly moved to another empty corner.

Levi cut through the humming crowd of kids and started rearranging the scattered assortment of store-bought snack foods and disposable cups. Keeping my gaze fixed on him, I started inching closer. I felt kind of stupid, like a kitten creeping up on a toy mouse. But still, I kept up with the stalking. Something productive would come out of all this. I just had no idea what.

A few seconds of awkward creeping later, I was standing next to him. Not that he knew I was there. He was still fixing up the mess that the support group kids had created within seconds of the food's arrival, muttering something under his breath about stupid fucking brats why the fuck can't they control themselves. I inhaled deeply and opened my mouth to speak, but quickly snapped it shut again. There was no way I could talk to Levi if I had no idea what to say. I shrank back, dropping my eyes to the floor. It was like the call button situation all over again. My brain had gone completely blank except for the singular thought _Why the fuck did I think this would be a good idea?_

"Can I help you?"

"Huh?" My head snapped upright. A pair of sharp grey eyes caught mine.

_Shit._

Levi cocked his head to the side, one hand resting on the table. "I asked you a question."

I stared blankly at Levi's face, which was just as bored and emotionless as I remembered. My mouth was hanging open like a broken mailbox, stuttery fragments of words sticking in the back of my throat. "I... um... I-I..."

He sighed and rolled his eyes. "Fine, _don't_ answer me." He turned back to the table and kept fixing things up. I didn't move. Once everything was in order again, Levi turned back to me. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

"S-sorry, it's just..." I murmured. "I didn't expect to see you here."

Levi blinked. "What?"

Realization hit me with the vague feeling of getting a door slammed in my face. There was no way he'd remember me. Nurses were probably just the same as their patients. You meet someone, you take care of them for a while, then they walk out of your life and you forget about them. That was how it had always gone for me before. There was no reason why this time should have been any different.

"I... Never mind." I turned to walk away, heat flushing my face.

"Wait."

I froze. Levi's voice reverberated in my head.

"Do I know you from somewhere?" he asked.

I turned stiffly back around. Levi was watching me expectantly, his bright grey eyes fixed to mine. "Y-yeah. At least, I think so."

I knew so. The real question was whether he did or not.

He stared intently at me for a while, his fingertips drumming against the tabletop. "You said your name is... Eren, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Eren Jaeger."

Levi's face was blank for a while longer. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn't. "Wait. Eren Jaeger?"

I wasn't sure whether he noticed my eyes lighting up or not. "Last summer? I spent a month here with a liver tumor."

A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth. "And you needed me to hold your hand before you went into surgery. Yeah. I remember."

The embarrassed flush returned to my face. Yep, it was Levi.

"Nice to know you're still alive." He leaned back on the table, watching the swarm of cancerous teenagers milling about the room. "So how have you been doing lately?"

"Fine," I said, doing the same. "What about you?"

"I'm just fan-freaking-tastic." He didn't give me much more detail than that. I guess he thought I had actually been paying attention during his introduction."So," he mused, "Is life any different with three-fourths of a liver?"

"Not really." It hadn't been all that spectacular to begin with. I didn't think my liver was making matters much worse than they already were.

He glanced over at me. "Not very talkative today, are we?"

I shrugged. "I don't know," I replied. "Coming here wasn't really my idea. It was all Mikasa's fault." My gaze swept through the crowd, searching for my sister. She was back in the circle, talking to Marco. The small, fragile-looking blonde kid was close by, shyly keeping his mouth shut. I'd already forgotten what his name was.

"Heh. So she's the same as before, then," Levi said, barely-detectable laughter in his voice.

"Yep."

He looked at me again. "I'm guessing you're no different, either."

"Probably," I said.

A second later, Hanji showed up. Levi turned away and started talking to her. So I left. It wasn't like I'd had much to say to him anyway.

I managed to swipe one of the remaining non-oatmeal cookies from the snack collaboration before heading back to the circle. Mikasa was still with Marco, and at some point Jean had joined the party. He was staring straight past Marco as if he and my sister were the only ones in the room. Marco wasn't saying much, only looking back and forth between the two of them while horseface ran his mouth like no tomorrow. I could tell that he was subtly trying not to laugh.

Naturally, I sat down as far from the public display of socialization as I could get.

"H-hi," a voice stuttered behind me.

My head whipped around. A pair of wide blue eyes met with mine. My heart skipped for a second, terrified that I'd accidentally cornered myself with Annie. Then I remembered that she couldn't speak.

"You aren't much for conversation either, huh?" It was the fragile blonde skater kid. My body shuddered in relief.

"No, not today," I said.

"Hm. Me neither," the kid replied. I didn't say anything more. After a few unresponsive seconds, he spoke up again. "I'm not very good at meeting new people."

"Neither am I."

"Really?"

I didn't bother answering.

"I'm Armin," the kid uninvitedly said. He looked at me with an awkwardly hopeful gleam in his eyes. I couldn't help thinking _Thank god he didn't expect me to remember his name._

"Eren," I said with a nod.

Armin gave me a small smile. _Progress._ "So, how'd you end up here, Eren?"

I shifted around in my chair and glanced across the circle. "My sister made me go," I said, nodding towards the punky-looking asian girl on the other side. "She found an ad in a coffee shop and decided that dragging me here would be a good idea."

"Hanji asked to post some of the flyers in my grandpa's store," Armin replied, making a face that grew increasingly discontented as he spoke. "He told me about it and sort of just dropped me off here against my will. Said he wouldn't pick me up until the whole hour is up."

"Wow. Harsh." I shifted back and folded up my legs on the chair.

"So you said you have leukemia?"

I took a vicious bite out of the cookie I'd stolen. "Yeah."

"And that was the same thing your mom died from?"

I glared over my shoulder at him. "Yes, it was. What's your point?"

"Nothing. Just... wow. That's so tragic."

I screamed internally. _Oh, god, not this again._

Armin didn't shut up like I'd expected him to. "You know," he said, "I can kind of relate. Or try to. I've kind of been through the same thi-"

I twisted around in the chair to face him. "There was a reason why I didn't mention it in my introduction, you know," I snarled.

Armin's mouth went slack, his eyes wide and glassy. He dropped his gaze to the floor. "S-sorry..." he whimpered.

The second I saw his face, I wanted to take everything back. I didn't know if he was aware, but he had an incredible talent for manipulating people with his own feelings. It had only taken seeing his kicked-puppy expression for a moment to make me realize what an absolute dick I was being. "No, don't be," I said quickly. "It was a valid question. What were you saying before?"

"Oh, um, just that..." Armin started, but he trailed off. "No. Wait. I already mentioned that in my introduction." He dropped his gaze and ran a hand through his fluffy blonde hair. "I'm sorry. I tend to repeat myself a lot."

"You certainly love apologizing, don't you?" I pointed out.

Armin laughed. "Sorry."

A smile forced its way onto my face. "There you go again."

"So what's your cancer status?" Armin asked, resettling himself in his chair.

"My cancer status?"

"You know, what it's been doing lately. Mine's been in remission for a pretty long time. I haven't had a relapse in years. I'm still not NEC or anything, but my doctor says my prognosis is good."

"Oh," I said. "Mine's... well, it's leukemia. It's some serious shit. Everyone knows that."

Armin's face fell just the slightest bit. "Oh."

"It hasn't been all that bad lately, though," I went on, holding one hand up in front of me as if that would stop the tidal wave of sympathy that was sure to come crashing down. "I was caught before anything went too far. I had a liver tumor last summer, but it was removed and everything. The cancer's in my bone marrow, though, and as far as my doctor can tell, it isn't going to be leaving anytime soon. The most anyone can do for me at this point is make sure it doesn't move anywhere else."

"Oh. Okay," Armin said. He seemed somewhat relieved. "So..."

"So?" I echoed.

Armin's wide blue eyes stared at me for a second before dropping to the ground. "Nothing," he said. "Just thought that you would pick up the conversation or something."

"You're not that good at making friends, are you?" I ventured.

Armin looked back up at me, his face tinted pink. "No," he admitted.

My mouth quirked up into a smile. "Neither am I," I said to my new best friend.

* * *

><p>The rest of the meeting wasn't torturous. Hanji and Levi commanded us back into the circle. We spent the remaining twenty minutes coming up with our own ice breaker questions and shooting them at whoever looked like they wouldn't throttle us if we embarrassed them. In other words, Ymir, Levi and Annie stayed pretty quiet. Well, Annie stayed quiet regardless. You know, the whole no-vocal-cords thing. Armin wound up scrambling to answer all of the rapid-fire questions that the support group shot at him. Jean got snapped at by Levi when he attempted to ask Mikasa if she would date a guy with a two tone undercut. Or amber eyes. Or a horse face. Or basically anyone who fit his exact description. In retaliation she asked Jean if he would ever, under any circumstances, kiss another guy. That turned into an entire no-homo-but-probably-if-I-absolutely-had-to exposition, which ended with Jean receding into his chair and staying quiet for the rest of the meeting. It was probably the highlight of my day.<p>

By the time four in the afternoon rolled around, the apprehension I'd felt at the beginning had all but disappeared. I still wanted to get the hell out of Trost. I wouldn't spend another second in that hospital if someone paid me. But I wasn't feeling ready to kill every other living organism in the room anymore.

Hanji called the end of the meeting, and the circle disassembled. Everyone was chatting as they made their way to the door. I heard a "See you Thursday" slipped into conversation every now and again. The kids all left while Levi and Hanji stayed behind to clean up the snacks and return the circle of therapeutic friendship to its former conference-room glory. I caught up with Mikasa on our way to the door.

"So," she said, glancing over her shoulder at me.

"So?" I echoed.

"So, how was it?"

"Not horrible," I deadpanned, turning away from her to stare straight ahead.

"Really?"

"No."

"That's perfect. Because we're going again Thursday."

I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at her. "What?"

"You heard me," she said, not even bothering to turn around.

I sighed and slapped a palm to my forehead, digging my fingers into my bangs. Well, I guess that settled the issue of how I would be spending my entire summer.

"Hey. What are you still doing here?"

I spun around at the sound of an all-too-familiar voice. Levi was walking down the hallway towards me, carrying the grocery store bags from before that now held empty containers. "L-Levi," I stammered.

"Yeah, it's me. Don't act so shocked," he said with a shrug as he caught up to me. "So how was it, losing your support group virginity?"

I stifled a laugh. He'd always had the best way of wording things. "It wasn't all that excruciating. Even if it was, I'll still be coming back on Thursday," I replied, nodding towards Mikasa, who was walking about fifty feet ahead of us.

"Nice," he said, giving me the closest thing to a smile that a person can accomplish without actually changing their facial expression. "You know," he added a second later, "it was a good thing that you decided to show up today."

I turned towards him, thinking _Well, it wasn't really me who decided._ "Really?"

"Yeah." He shifted one of the bags further up on his arm, which I found myself staring at without realizing it.

_If you looked up toned in a dictionary, you'd probably get a picture of that._

I quickly tore my eyes away. "What makes you say that?"

"You need it," he said, a smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth.

I didn't even bother trying to defend myself. It was always a lost cause when it came to Levi. "Whatever."

"See you Thursday, brat," he called after me as I sped up to reach Mikasa before she walked out without me.

Of all the things he could have remembered about me, it had to be that stupid nickname.

I found myself blushing in the late afternoon heat. My hand flew up to cover my burning face. I silently begged Mikasa not to turn around.

_God fucking dammit, Levi._

* * *

><p>Neither Mikasa nor I said much on our way back home. Dad was waiting in the parking lot when we came out. We piled into the car, Mikasa riding shotgun and me in the backseat. She asked if he'd been waiting around for very long, he said no, and the conversation pretty much ended there. Fifteen minutes later, we were back in our driveway. We climbed out, Mikasa said goodbye to my dad, I made some kind of pathetic effort to do the same, and he promised to be back by nine. Then he left.<p>

I staggered back to my room and collapsed on my bed. Strange. The support group meeting was probably the first actual activity that I'd done in weeks, but for some reason I still felt exhausted.

Mikasa walked into my room without so much as a half-assed attempt to warn me. "So, support group."

I let out a long, melodramatic sigh. "Support group."

She traipsed over and sat down next to me on the bed.

"So is this going to be a thing now, or..."

"Yeah, it's a thing. Twice a week. All summer."

I sighed again. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck."

"What?"

"Is Dad going to be okay with driving me? I mean, I know he's really busy all the time, and-"

"Don't worry about Dad," Mikasa interjected, cutting me short. "I asked him about it. He told me he can sneak out of the lab every now and then for a few minutes at a time. He's got assistants to keep tabs on everything. It's really no big deal."

"Oh," was all I said. I rolled over onto my side to face her. It seemed like everyone had known I was going to support group except for me. I hadn't known that Dad could get out of work. I had always thought the multiple hours he'd spent in his lab office were a mandatory thing. Or maybe things were only that way after I'd been diagnosed.

Mikasa grabbed a pillow from my headboard and flopped down on her stomach. "So, was I hallucinating, or was that nurse you had last summer one of the admins of the group?"

"You mean Levi?" I said before I could stop myself.

By the time I turned to look at Mikasa, her eyes had widened in surprise and that smirk of hers was already creeping onto her face. "You remembered his name."

"Yeah. Why wouldn't I? He said it during the introductions. Didn't you hear him?"

"I did. I didn't think _you_ would, though."

I willed my blood not to come rushing up to my cheeks like it always seemed to do whenever Levi came up in context. "Okay. So what if I did? He was a pretty kick-ass nurse. I was stuck in with him in Trost for a month. How could I have forgotten him?"

"You never remembered any of your other nurses."

"Well... they weren't Levi."

I immediately realized my mistake. Mikasa's smirk turned into a 100% pure shit-eating grin.

"Okay. I see how it is."

"No, you don't." I sighed in defeat and rolled over, smothering myself in my pillows. "Fuck you, Mikasa."

"Ew. Eren, that's incest."

I shut her up with a quick pillow to the face. She immediately dissolved into a fit of giggles, snatched the pillow I'd thrown and started swinging it at me. I grabbed the closest pillow that wasn't already on the floor and shoved it at her in retaliation. We wound up starting the first pillow fight we'd had in maybe two years. I tired myself out after maybe five minutes. I collapsed back into the pillows, gasping. I wondered briefly why my body had to suck at doing what it was supposed to.

"But seriously," Mikasa said, falling onto her back next to me. "What is the deal with you and Levi?"

"I don't know," I replied once I'd gotten some air back into my lungs. "He was just a cool nurse when I had him, and I guess we were sort of friends for a while? I don't know. Everything sort of just came undone after I left. I didn't think he'd be at the meeting today." I looked up at her, my eyebrows pulling into a faint scowl. "Did you know about this already too?"

"No," Mikasa said. "I didn't know you two were so close, though."

I let out a soft, nasal laugh. "What makes you think we were close?"

"Come on. _'It was a good thing you decided to show up today?_' It sounded almost like he missed you."

My eyes widened and I suddenly found myself sitting bolt upright. "Wait. You heard that?"

"Uh, yeah. I was, like, forty feet in front of you. Of course I heard it."

I could feel my blood rising up under my skin and searing my face. I took a breath and forced it back down before speaking again. Levi somehow always managed to embarrass me, even when he wasn't there. "So why are you bringing him up now?"

"Just thought it was interesting. That's all." Mikasa curled up around the pillow that I'd been hitting her with a minute earlier. Her nose buried itself into her ever-present scarf.

"It is, isn't it?" I said, lying back down next to her.

Less than ten seconds later...

"So if you go to support group, you'll probably get to see Levi."

I froze. "Uh... probably."

"Do you want to see him again?"

"Do I..." The question was harder to answer than it should have been. Of course I wanted to see Levi. I wanted to know what he'd been doing, where he'd been all this time, what he'd been up to lately, and a billion other questions that would probably seem insanely prying if I tried to ask them all at once. I'd missed him. It had just taken seeing him again to make me realize that.

Then again, that day's support group had been awkward as fuck.

"You do, don't you?"

There Mikasa went again, being her usual perceptive-as-fuck self. I sighed for what felt like the six hundredth time that day. "Yeah, I... I guess I do."

"So is it a deal, then?"

"Is what a deal?"

"It's simple," Mikasa said, sitting up and leaning over me the way she always did when she was trying to make a point while we were lying down. "You go to support group and at least make an attempt to get a life, the way I wanted you to when I signed us up for this. And every time you go, you get to see Levi again. Make sense?"

I rolled my eyes. "Mikasa, I don't think you understand the full extent of my social disabilities."

"No, I think I understand them perfectly. Or at least well enough to know that signing up for the YCSG isn't as horrible an idea as you think it is."

I buried my face in the pillows and took a deep, suffocated breath, mulling over her reasoning in my head. She was right. It did make sense. The support group was supposed to be helping me get over my social roadblocks. And Levi was part of it. It made me wonder if he was in on Mikasa's plot too, whatever the fuck it happened to be.

I resurfaced from the pillows long enough to speak. "I don't think that no is a viable option."

"It isn't."

"You're going to make me go, regardless of whether I want to or not."

"I am."

"So why are you trying to bribe me in the first place?"

"Because you need incentive." Mikasa pushed my shoulder and rolled me onto my side to face her. "If you have a reason to go to support group, it probably won't suck as much. I think seeing Levi twice a week isn't half bad, for motivational purposes. So what do you say?" She smiled hopefully at me, finally showing me a facial expression that I didn't want to punch off.

I sucked in a deep breath and let it out one more sigh, longer than what any human should be capable of. "Fine."

Mikasa's smile turned into a victorious grin.


	6. Cancer Titans

**Happy 12/13/14. Today is the last sequential date that any of us are probably going to see for the rest of our lives, so I had to post a chapter today. **

**I really don't know what to put in this note. I don't even know if anyone reads these things. I know I certainly don't. So I might as well get the fishing for followers and reviews out of the way now. My author blog is asking-appelia on tumblr, which currently is mostly random crap that I reblog since that's all I really have time to do at this point in my life (thanks, AP classes). I'm also tracking the tags "fic: tmiu" "fic: tmi" and "fic: the monsters inside us" just in case anyone decides they want to post something about this. I probably shouldn't go nuts asking for the reviews, since you can't get any of those without hits. I just breached 200 a few days ago. Hopefully things will get better.**

**Now it's time to race to get this chapter posted before midnight.**

* * *

><p>Going to the second meeting didn't scare me nearly as much as going to the first did.<p>

Thursday afternoon was almost an exact replay of Tuesday. Dad dropped Mikasa and me off in front of Trost Regional. She reminded him that the meeting would end at four, and everybody gave a half-assed goodbye since we'd be seeing each other again in an hour. We both stumbled out of the car and watched him drive back to his lab, then started towards the sliding glass doors at the entrance. This time I was no longer itching to bolt in the other direction. That wasn't to say that I had warmed up to this whole group therapy thing after one session. That couldn't have been further from thr truth. I just... didn't hate it nearly as much as I used to.

Mikasa led me down the same corridor through the radiology ward and into the small cluster of conference rooms where 4A was waiting for us with open arms. The loud, steady hum of conversation filled the air inside. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed here since the first meeting. It was all the same kids, same chairs in the same circle, same two LPNs hanging out in the corner and talking about us behind our backs. I slunk over to the table that had once again been shoved into the corner. They'd put the snacks out at the beginning of the meeting this time instead of holding off and using it as a reward for participating. Maybe they expected us to willingly talk about our problems now. That could have meant that the LPNs were either geniuses or completely clueless when it came to the workings of the teenage brain.

"H-Hi, Eren."

That stutter. I had heard it before.

I spun around. Armin was standing a few feet behind me, one hand holding a cup of store-bought popcorn, the other shoved nervously into the pocket of his shorts. "Hey," I said, grabbing a popcorn cup of my own.

"So... how's life?" he asked.

"Boring," I deadpanned in response, picking a few grains out of my cup and tossing them into my mouth.

"Mine too." Armin shrugged and dropped his eyes to the floor. "I guess we really don't do much outside of here, do we?"

"Nope."

"What about during the year? Don't you have school and stuff?"

"No," I said factually. "My dad withdrew me during my first year of high school."

"Why?"

"Spent too much time in the hospital, wasn't really any point in trying to make up for lost time. I've been homeschooled ever since."

"Wow. That's weird"

"What's weird?"

"I get homeschooled too. My grandpa withdrew me in first grade."

I stopped munching and stared at him, my eyes wide. "First grade? Seriously?"

Armin nodded. "Yep. Remember my introduction from yesterday? I was diagnosed when I was really little. I'd been missing out on school for years, but I was always able to catch up. Eventually, though, I started getting penalties for all the absences, and the principal told us that if I kept missing days I'd have to be held back, so he just took me out and enrolled me in a program. It was probably a better idea than trying to keep me in regular school. I probably would've lost it if I had to do the first grade over. Everything was way too easy as it was. I can't even imagine having to learn what I already knew all over again."

"Too easy?" I said, confused. "So, what, did you end up skipping first grade in homeschool or something?"

Armin shrugged. "Um... sort of, I guess."

"How far have you gotten?" I asked, my curiosity spurred.

"Well..." Armin said, dropping his eyes again and flashing a sheepish grin. "Not to brag or anything, but... when I was ten, and I was finally healthy enough to start going to school again, I didn't bother, because... well, it turned out I was way ahead of where I should have been."

"Wait, wait, let me get this straight... you skipped ahead while you were getting homeschooled?"

He nodded, his eyes bright.

"How far?" I demanded enthusiastically.

"I was supposed to be going into fifth grade, but I was learning at a seventh grade math and science level, and my english was eighth. So, technically, I was two or three grades ahead of where I should have been. I probably could have gone into middle school then, but, well... just look at me."

"Okay," I said, my eyes already fixed on him. "What exactly am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Just look," Armin replied, stretching his arms out and flicking his hands back towards himself like he was directing my gaze up and down his tiny body. "Is it not obvious enough or something?"

"Is what not obvious? Am I supposed to be looking for some kind of deformity? I really don't..." I trailed off and shrugged.

"Eren, I am the physical equivalent of an anorexic midget. I was even more anorexic and midgety back then. Also, if you haven't guessed, I'm a textbook bullying target. I was already tiny compared to kids my own age. If I tried to get into a middle school, I would have have been shark bait."

A second of staring longer, and suddenly it all made sense. The corners of my mouth twitched upward. "Yeah, it was probably a good idea to stick with the homeschooling."

Armin laughed. "That's what I thought."

"Alright, circle up, people! We've got a schedule here!"

I didn't have to look towards the source to know whose voice was shouting over the din of socializing teens. Levi had a very distinct sound.

In seconds, everybody had gathered into the chair circle. Hanji and Levi were sitting side by side. I dropped into the first empty chair I saw that wasn't next to or across from them. I didn't think I'd be able to handle an entire meeting trapped under that piercing grey gaze of his. Not until I'd gotten over my social awkwardness, anyway.

I swear, sitting directly next to Jean was completely unintentional.

By the time I glanced over to my left and realized my mistake, it was far too late. Hanji started tapping her clipboard and kickstarted the meeting.

"Alright, everyone. Before we get started, is there anything that anyone wants to ask that we didn't cover in the last meeting?"

It wasn't too awkward of a question to begin with. However, it became that way within a few minutes. Most of the questions were cancer-related. It made sense, what with this being a support group for cancer victims and everything. For the most part, people wanted to know about how other people had been diagnosed and how well they'd been doing lately. It turned out that Reiner had been a huge athlete all his life and wound up getting sun poisoning during his freshman year of high school which quickly went bad. Bertolt had been diagnosed a few months after finishing his growth spurt and over the course of three years had several of his bones replaced with prosthetics. When Ymir was asked what she meant when she said she had never gone into total remission, she explained that she had been treated but still couldn't keep weight on and got fatigue and muscle pain every now and again. Marco was an open book about whatever the group asked him. Armin's long remission earned him a considerable number of dirty looks from the rest of the group. Krista once again refused to talk about her tragic family history, which no one should have been asking about in the first place, since the mere mention of the subject brought tears to her eyes. Connie asked Sasha how she stayed so skinny, then got smacked over the back of the head. And then...

"Mikasa, are you single?"

...and then Jean happened.

Mikasa stared across the circle at him, her face blank but her eyes livid. I had mistakenly sat down further away from her than I should have.

"Yes," she deadpanned. A self-satisfied grin spread across Jean's horse I mean face. Then Mikasa spoke up again. "Now can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Do you always hit on people in your therapy groups?"

A collective "ooooooooh" rippled through the circle. Jean's smile dropped so fast I was surprised it didn't fall off his reddening face and shatter on the floor. Mikasa stared at him, a spiteful smirk turning up on her lips. I almost missed the amused flicker in Levi's eyes that broke through his bored expression for a split second.

"I... Um... I-I..." Jean stammered. A grin broke out on my face and a laugh slipped through before I could stop it.

Suddenly horse-face had spun around and locked his eyes on me. "Jaeger."

My grin disappeared. "Yes?"

"I've got a question for you."

A shot of dread seeped into my veins. It was as if I had known what he was going to ask before he even opened his mouth.

"Why didn't you bring up your mom in your introduction?"

I swallowed. My heart knocked at my ribs like an overenthusiastic door-to-door salesman.

_Fuck._

Jean shot me a smug smile. I wanted to claw at his face until my fingernails scraped it off. "Well?" he prodded. "Aren't you going to answer?"

"It's..." I started, trying to ignore the feeling of rage burning in my circulatory system. "It's a sensitive subject."

"But Mikasa brought it up. She's your sister."

"Adopted," I spat.

"Doesn't matter. We're still talking about the same mom, right?"

"Yeah. And I told you why. I just don't like talking about it."

Marco elbowed him in the ribs. "Jean, stop it," he whispered.

Jean didn't stop. "I know, but I'm asking why."

"It doesn't matter why."

"Of course it does. This is a support group. We're supposed to be talking about this sort of thing." Jean shifted forward in his seat and leaned towards me as if getting in my face would make me more inclined to answer. "I'm trying to help you, Eren."

"Okay, no," I snapped, pushing myself forward to face him. "No, you are not trying to help me. You're being an insensitive douche and trying to jam your stupid, oversized nose where it doesn't belong."

"Eren, calm down," Mikasa hissed.

"Yeah. Listen to your sister, Jaeger."

"Jean," Marco murmured warningly.

"You mean your girlfriend? Oh wait, she's not interested!"

Jean's face flushed red. "That was ages ago, Jaeger. No one thinks it's funny anymore!"

"Then why do you keep bringing it up? If it hasn't occurred to you yet, this is a therapy group, not a goddamn speed-dating service!"

"Okay, that's enough. Both of you, shut your mouths and keep them shut. Your question privileges have been revoked."

My head spun towards the shout. The bored, lifeless look on Levi's face didn't match the authoritative annoyance in his voice. He lifted one hand and extended a finger towards me. "You. Eren."

My face heated up as if his eyes were UV lights. "Yes?"

"Switch seats with Connie. It's probably best if you two stay separated."

I nodded and obeyed him without another word. I heard Jean murmur something that sounded like "Wow. Oversensitive, much?" behind my back, which was cut short by a sharp "Hey. I said mouths shut." from Levi.

The rest of the question session went pretty smoothly. Then the meeting turned into talking about things that people wanted to share of their own free will. I kept my mouth shut like Levi had commanded and glared at Jean the entire time.

The hour rolled by even more slowly than it had on Tuesday. When we were finally dragging down to the last few minutes, Hanji tapped her clipboard extra loud to get the circle's attention. "Hey, guys. We're running out of time and I've got an assignment for the new recruits that I wanted to give before the meeting ends."

"An assignment? I thought it was summer vacation," Jean muttered, earning himself a piercing glare from Levi. He snapped his mouth shut that very second.

"It's just to get you initiated," Reiner cut in as if he'd forgotten Levi's orders from earlier. "Lets the group get to know you better. You're not getting graded for it or anything."

Hanji stopped tapping her pen and pointed it towards him. "Exactly. Anyhow, these are just open-ended questions, no length requirements or anything, and you are allowed to write whatever you want. We don't judge content here. Sometimes they're for the whole group, sometimes just for first-time members. It also gives us a sort of kickstarter topic for the meetings. Think of this as your hazing." She glanced down at her clipboard. "Alright. Today's question is... how do you think of your cancer?" She looked back up at the group. "So, my idea behind this came from something a pediatric patient told me a while back."

_Great. We're getting questions inspired by something some child who's probably dead now said while they were dying._

"She told me that she thought of her disease as a dragon and her doctor was a knight who was trying to rescue her from it. And, of course, I thought it was adorable at the time, but it really got me thinking..."

_I wonder who that kid's doctor was._

"I feel like everyone has some metaphorical way of envisioning their disease, whether they are aware of it or not. It changes from person to person, and sometimes that affects the way that they cope with it, which is why I decided to bring it up today. All you have to do is write up a response, print it out and bring it in to read out loud next the next time we meet. And we know, we know, public speaking is scary and all that, but it's okay. Remember, this is a support group." I caught her looking sympathetically at Armin. "I promise you we don't judge here.

"And if you can't come up with anything, fine," Levi added. "But we'll know the difference if you just didn't bother with the assignment."

_Yeah_, I thought to myself. _Sure you will._

* * *

><p>I hadn't wanted to join that stupid support group. I had never asked for social obligations that I didn't need or another reason to be visiting Trost Regional when I was already sick of the godforsaken place. I had never asked to be given a writing assignment when I already had an endless stream of those coming from my homeschooling program. Obviously I had no intention of doing it. Hanji had said that the assignment wasn't 100% mandatory anyway.<p>

So why the fuck was I sitting in front of my laptop and staring at a blank Word document?

My tutor had come in that day. He went over my grades for the past month of my work in the online classroom, we figured out what I needed to work at a little more, then we had spent a few hours in the kitchen, gathered around the table with my notes and textbooks scattered everywhere. He'd given me a packet of documents from the Gilded Age to write a DBQ essay on. He said it would be due the next time we met. I had no idea when that would be, so I had gotten started as soon as possible. Then I had finished. And then things had just sort of spiraled out of my control and progressed on their own.

I folded my legs up underneath me and leaned forward on my knees, staring at the blank white pixels in front of me. The tiny black line of the cursor blinked steadily on and off, begging me to stop screwing around and start typing something. Footsteps echoed through the house as Mikasa scampered around downstairs, doing whatever the fuck she does while I'm busy not being busy at all. I hardly noticed the difference when they started to get louder.

"Hey. What are you up to?"

I looked up from my irritatingly blank support group assignment. Mikasa was leaning into my room, her hands clinging to the doorframe and her feet on tiptoe out in the hallway."Hm?" I mumbled in response.

My sister walked into my room without waiting for an invitation and leaned over my shoulder. "Why do you have a Word document open?"

I glanced back and forth between her and my laptop. "Just... writing something."

"Oh," she said. And then... "Wait a second. Are you actually doing that thing they assigned to us in support group?"

I craned my neck around to look at her and cocked my eyebrows. "Are you?"

"No. I'm not the one with cancer. How would I have an abstract vision of something I don't even have personal experience in?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. You could write about me. Or Mom, maybe?"

"No. It's not personal enough," she said, flopping down behind me on the bed and shaking the mattress. We heard the distant hum and gravelly scrape of a car pulling into the driveway. "Hey. Sounds like Dad's home."

"For once," I scoffed, turning back to my blank document.

"Well, good luck with writing about your abstract visions of cancer. I really didn't think you had it in you." She straightened up and turned towards the door.

I looked up at her retreating back. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to say hi," she said, her voice clipped. It sounded as if I should have been thinking the same thing.

"Okay," I replied. "I'll be down later."

We both knew I was lying.

Mikasa walked out of my room just as the front door latch clicked and the door swung open. I returned to staring at my blank assignment, my twisted-together fingers pressed to my lips, doing nothing but think. The more I contemplated it, the more I realized that I didn't really think about my cancer in any abstract way. I just thought it was horrible. There was never really anything else to it.

I started thinking back to when I was ten. The ten I had been before I was diagnosed, when it had been my mother who had leukemia, not me. Everything always seems different when you're younger. I tried to remember if there had ever been any huge, fantastical imaginings that I had made up about my mom and her disease. As far as I knew, there weren't any. At least, none that made any sense. The only thing I had ever imagined about her cancer was her being able to beat it. I had come up with about a million different situations where my mom would live and everything would be okay. Where her tumors started shrinking, or someone came up with a surgery to replace every ounce of bone marrow in her body, or even where her body started attacking the cancer itself. I'd come up with so many of them. I had an entire arsenal of scenarios in my head that I was wishing harder than I had ever wished before would happen. The worse she got, the more I created. I must have thought that if I came up with enough situations, one of them would eventually come true. But none of them did. I just watched her get sicker and sicker, watched the cancer leaching off of her like an angry parasite, eating away at her more and more until finally there was nothing left-

I froze. My eyes widened. Cancer. It eats people. That's what it does.

That was it.

I slammed my hands down on the keyboard and started typing.

* * *

><p>By the time the next support group meeting came around, I was prepared.<p>

A pattern had started to develop around it. My dad dropped me and Mikasa off. We walked in. I grabbed some food. Armin somehow found his way over to me. We talked until the LPNs told us to get into the circle.

"Okay. Did all of our new recruits remember their assignments from the last meeting?"

A few wary gazes shifted around the circle. A face or two flushed with shame. Annie stared straight ahead, looking just as angsty and bored as she had every time I'd seen her before.

"Um, Hanji? If it helps, I wrote something to get everyone started."

I looked around the circle for the source of the voice. Marco had shifted forward in his seat, a folded-up slip of paper in one hand.

Hanji brightened up. "Aw, you didn't have to. Go ahead. Show 'em how it's done."

"Okay," Marco said with a shy smile. He unfolded the paper and looked the words over once, then again for good measure. "This might not be all that great, but I wrote it in about half an hour, so just bear with me, okay?"

"Just shut up and read, Shakespeare," Jean said, giving Marco's shoulder a friendly nudge.

A slight flush lit up behind his freckles and he looked back down at the paper. "Alright. Here goes..."

"I know that so many people have said this before me, and I probably won't be the last one to put it this way. But there really isn't a better way to put it. When I think of cancer, I think of a battle. We are the soldiers, and our disease is the enemy. We don't really know what its objective is. Maybe it doesn't even have one. But we all do our best to fight it off anyway and survive as long as we can. The fight lasts longer for some than for others. Sometimes we come out alive, and sometimes we are lost in the battle. And for us, that's all it really is: a battle. The war itself is ongoing. There is no definite cure. Cancer is not something that can be defeated just yet. But people are still being diagnosed. Soldiers are still being sent to the war front to do battle with this relentless disease. For now, there's no way to tell who will be the victor. All we can do is keep fighting. One day, all of this will finally be resolved. And the soldiers just need to stick it out until that day comes."

He folded the paper back up with a relieved smile, his cheeks turned a shade brighter. I was surprised the circle didn't stand up and start a round of applause. I'd heard the "cancer is a battle" speech at least a thousand times over, but never like that. I had no idea Marco was so eloquent.

"Fantastic start, Marco," Hanji said, her voice breathless. "Alright. Who thinks they can follow that up?" She looked expectantly around the circle, an eager smile on her face.

Krista was the next to stand up. It was kind of weird. It seemed that the only people who had done the assignment were the ones who hadn't had to do it at all.

Krista's speech compared cancer to a black hole. No one knows why it had to evolve the way it did. Its only purpose is as a destructive force, like the implosion in the core of a dead star. It doesn't have to be the way it is, but it is regardless. And once it appears, it's only a matter of time before it destroys everything around it. And once those things are gone, they never come back.

I wondered if this was Krista's attempt at justifying her cancer-free presence in the group.

Sasha was the first newcomer to stand up. She described her cancer as an incinerator, something that did its best to burn up everything that was thrown at it. I wasn't sure if she was talking about her cancer or the whacked-out digestive system it had left her with.

Ymir hadn't written anything. She didn't bother trying to elaborate.

Armin volunteered next. He quickly explained for the third time that he'd been diagnosed at a younger age than anyone else in support group and his description might sound stupid, but that was because he'd come up with it when he was seven and didn't have a better imagination. He went on to speed-read a paragraph about a purple blob monster that lived in the side of his neck, where a tumor had once appeared in a lymph node there. He crumpled up the document in his hands the second he had finished reading, dug his fingers into his thick blonde bangs and murmured "That was so embarrassing" as soon as he thought no one was listening anymore.

Judging by Annie's attitude so far, I was sure she hadn't been one of the poor souls who had actually done the assignment. To say I was surprised when she dug her phone out of her pocket and handed it over to Reiner would have been a massive understatement.

Reiner started reading from the tiny screen in his hand. "I don't really have an abstract vision of my cancer. This is mainly because it barely even exists anymore. After my surgery, my symptoms went into remission and haven't relapsed since. But if I had to compare my cancer to anything, I'd compare it to a strip of duct tape that was stuck over my mouth. I'd always been kind of quiet, and I didn't think I'd be losing much when my doctor told me the only way to get rid of my disease would be to remove my vocal cords. It turned out that I would miss speaking a lot more than I thought I would. I don't miss not being able to talk to my friends, since it was something I hadn't done very much in the first place, but I quickly found out that I needed my voice for a lot of things I hadn't even bothered thinking about when I agreed to get it cut out. Now I can't even ask my dad to get me something from the grocery store without taking the time to write it down somewhere. People think that just because I can't speak, that means they don't need to listen to me anymore. Communicating has become nothing but an inconvenience for me. I never realized exactly how much I needed my voice until it was gone. My cancer has silenced me more than I ever imagined it would."

The entire support group went almost as silent as Annie. Reiner gave his script another once-over and let out a long exhale. "Wow. That was..."

No one offered anything up to help him finish the sentence. He looked over Bertolt to the little blonde sitting two chairs to his left. She leaned over and stared expressionlessly back, then extended a hand to take her phone. Reiner dropped it gingerly into her palm.

"Don't worry, Annie," he said. "We're here to listen to you." He looked expectantly around at the circle. "Right, guys?"

The group immediately sprang to life.

"Yeah, of course."

"We totally are."

"We're here for you."

"We're listening, Annie."

"It's a support group, what else is it for?"

Annie didn't seem to give a shit either way.

"Who's up next?" Hanji asked, glancing around the circle.

I knew the answer was me, but I wasn't about to go announcing it to the world. I tugged a folded-up piece of printer paper out of my pocket and started working at the creases. "I... uh, wrote something..."

Hanji's eyes brightened up behind her glasses and she pointed her pen in my direction. "Eren!"

_No backing out of this now._ I took a deep breath and started to read.

"I've heard people describe cancer in a lot of ways. They always say that it's a noble fight, and the people who get diagnosed are heroes, and that spending hours in the hospital getting bombarded by chemicals and radiation is actually a worthwhile way for someone to spend their life. But the truth is, it's all a lie. There is no fighting when it comes to this disease. Cancer is a monster. It's huge, and relentless, and almost indestructible. It eats people from the inside out. Thousands of people are lost to it every year, and there is nothing anyone is able to do. A surefire cure doesn't exist, and the treatment options are almost worse than the disease itself. While we're all struggling along, cancer feeds off of us without a care in the world, eating away at its victims until there is nothing left. Once cancer is there, it never leaves. It's a threat that hangs over you for your entire life. You can never escape. The cancer will always be there, waiting to devour you as soon as it gets the chance."

The second I stopped reading, I immediately wished I hadn't started in the first place.

The entire support group was staring at me. The room had gone silent, save for the nervous throbbing in my chest. Everyone's face had gone rigid with shock. Except Levi's. His face was just rigid. Hanji had stopped her clipboard tapping. Armin was staring at me as if he were relieved that his speech was no longer the worst. Krista's eyes were huge and glassy. _At least someone here gets it_, I thought.

I was the one to break the silence. I owed the circle that much, since I was the one who had created it in the first place. "Sorry about that. I'm really not any good at writing, and I guess I was kind of angry when I came up with the metaphor-"

"No, no," Hanji said quietly. "That's perfect. That's exactly what we were looking for."

"R-really?" I stuttered.

"Of course," she replied. "This was an assignment to express yourself. And... that's how you do it, I guess."

Reiner pitched in. "Believe it or not, that's actually not the darkest submission we've ever gotten."

I raised my eyebrows. "Then what was?"

"Well, there was this one kid who joined the first year who wrote-"

"Please, Reiner. I thought we agreed never to bring this up again," Bertolt said.

"What? It was a cool story."

"Then we'll explain it to him later," Marco cut in. He turned to me, his soft brown eyes fixing on me. "That was cool, Eren. I never looked at it that way before."

"Because you're not a cynic, Marco," Jean added. Marco rolled his eyes and gave Jean a soft kick in the ankle.

"Dark stuff is something we're sort of used to," Connie said. "I mean, did you miss the black hole speech and the duct tape thing? That's what cancer is. It's dark. Cancer sucks, and there's not really any other way to put it."

"He's right," Marco agreed. "And that's just how you see it. That was the point of the assignment, right?" He glanced over to Hanji for confirmation.

Levi ended up being the one to respond. "Exactly."

* * *

><p>The rest of circle time went by without a hitch. We all talked about what we thought of the compositions we'd heard and the different ways we all pictured the disease, and Armin had to explain the theory behind the purple neck blob. (He'd seen images of lymphoma under a microscope and decided that was what his cancer looked like.) 4:00 seemed to come around more quickly than it had at the first two meetings. Before I knew it, we were disseminating from the circle and going our separate ways.<p>

I blindly followed Mikasa to the sliding glass doors of the cancer center exit. I didn't even register the faint sound of footsteps behind us.

"Hey, brat. Nice work today."

I spun around. Once again, Levi had managed to sneak up on me. "You really think so?"

"I'm assuming you don't," he said, his short little legs somehow carrying him so fast that he had to slow down to keep pace with me.

"No," I replied, jamming my hands into the pockets of my shorts. "I feel like such a dick for writing what I did. It's like I just told the entire support group that they're going to die and there's nothing they can do about it."

Levi's next words came out of nowhere. "Some of them probably are."

I would have stopped dead if Mikasa weren't power walking on ahead of us. My head whipped around towards Levi. "What?"

"Some of the kids in the group are probably going to die," he repeated, his voice just as flat as it had been the first time he'd said it. His face somehow retained its bored, level expression. "It's a cancer support group. Almost every single person who showed up in that conference room today has a potentially lifelong disease. Odds are, at least one or two of them are going to end up going terminal. I've seen kids die their way out of YCSG before. It happens every year. No matter how you slice it, the cake is always the same."

I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn't find the words to respond. My head swiveled forward again and I stared straight ahead at Mikasa. We were almost to the exit. Something in me quietly hoped that my dad would show up late that day.

"What is it now?" Levi asked. "Was that somehow even darker than your little hopelessness speech?"

"No," I said. "I just... I haven't thought of that in a while. That this is a support group for dying kids to help them deal with the fact that they're dying."

"No truer words have been spoken, brat," he said, his eyes glinting in the sinking sunlight that streamed through the huge window panes at the cancer center entrance.

The front doors slid open in front of Mikasa. I picked up my pace and sprinted ahead, hoping they wouldn't slide shut again before I reached them. I looked out into the parking lot. My dad's car was nowhere to be seen.

"So... undefeatable cancer monsters?"

I crossed through the door and spun around. I wasn't aware that Levi had still been following me.

I glanced over towards Mikasa. She'd stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. She must have noticed the absence of our dad's silver Toyota in the parking lot. I watched her turn around and make her way towards one of the random benches that occasionally present themselves for people to sit on while waiting for things outside a hospital. Her eyes caught mine for a split second, just to let me know that she'd seen me.

I turned back to Levi. "Yeah," I said, shrugging. "No clue where the idea came from, but... there it was."

"It kind of makes me wonder..." he murmured, staring out at the parking lot as if it were a beautiful sunset. "Where exactly did you learn to be so grim?"

"I guess I learn from the best."

He let out a noise somewhere between a laugh and an unusually quiet sneeze. "Well played, brat."

I glanced over at Mikasa again. She'd taken her phone out of her bag and was now fixated on it, her fingers tapping furiously at the screen. She stopped and locked the screen, then started up again a minute later. Probably texting a friend or something. I tried not to think about what a bang-up job Mikasa did of unintentionally reminding me of my spectacular lack of a social life and failed miserably.

Levi's voice dragged my thoughts out of their pit of despair. "So, about what I said earlier..."

"You mean about helping the dying to die easier?" I asked, my voice sounding automated.

"Yeah," he said. I cast a sideways glance at him and his grey eyes held mine for longer than I had ever intended them to. "Look, I didn't mean to sound like a killjoy or anything, and I just want to clarify something. Cancer kills people. It's a fact. Hell, it's a goddamn statistic. But what I said was just referencing things that have happened before. I wasn't forecasting the future for this year or anything."

"You sounded pretty sure of yourself when you said it."

"I know. That's because I was speaking from experience. But I'm not saying that the same thing is going to happen this year. I'm just trying to think realistically. Some of the kids in the support group might end up dying, or they might not. There's really no way to know until it actually happens."

A small smile twitched at the corners of my mouth. "So it's like Schroedinger's support group."

"Basically."

A memory from last summer's surgery episode resurfaced somewhere in the minute of silence that followed.

"If that's what you really believe, then why did you tell me that before the operation?" I asked distantly.

Levi blinked, his eyes clouding with confusion. "Tell you what?"

"That I would be okay," I said. "I mean, if the surgery hadn't happened yet, then there was no way of really knowing, right?"

"That was different," Levi said, turning to stare out at the parking lot again. "First of all, when a patient is having a panic attack, a good rule of thumb to stick to is not to tell them there's a chance they could die. You already seemed to be completely aware of that, so I kept my mouth shut on the subject. Secondly, Dr. Erwin has dealt with surgeries way more complicated than yours. In the two years I've spent working for the guy, he's taught me a few different bits and pieces about tumor locations. Your cancer was relatively isolated and could be removed without your needing an entirely new liver. He'd figured that out ages before the surgery. So I'd have to say the outcome was a little more definite than normal for you."

"And that was why you 'just knew'?"

"Precisely, Sherlock," he deadpanned.

Things went quiet again after that. Levi and I leaned up against the wall, staring out at the cars, while Mikasa sat nearby on the bench, silently reminding me that she had friends to text and I didn't. A spark realization had started to sputter in the back of my mind. But when I turned to ask Levi why he had followed me outside, I was cut short by the sound of tires scraping over concrete. I looked back to see my dad's Highlander pulling into the parking lot. "Finally," I murmured under my breath.

"You just can't wait to get rid of me, can you, brat?" Levi snipped. His stock-still face wouldn't let me know whether it was a joke or not.

I risked the assumption that it was and shrugged him off. "If that's me, then I can't even imagine what you're going through."

Levi rolled his eyes. "Whatever. See you around, brat."

With that, he spun on his heel and headed back inside.

My dad pulled up alongside the curb by the entrance. Mikasa stuck her phone back into her messenger bag and stood up. I followed her, and we climbed into the car. The drive home was nothing more than a long, drawn-out awkward silence that didn't end until we were dropped off in the driveway of our house.

* * *

><p>That night, I somehow found myself in the backyard and lying sprawled out on our trampoline.<p>

I didn't know why we even still owned the stupid thing. It had been fun at one point in my life. But that had been a long time ago, when I still thought that cursing was actually a bad thing and kissing scenes in movies were gross. And when I didn't have cancer. And still had a mom. We'd bought it just a little bit before we adopted Mikasa. The first few times I'd spent jumping around on it were pretty lonely. I had never had many friends, not even when I was still enrolled in a normal school. Then I had Mikasa. I remember that for a while I had thought that she had only wanted to come home with us because we had a trampoline. Then after that, we invited friends over and we would all sit up there and hang out, making up games and trying to do stupid stunts without any real fear of getting hurt.

But then things changed. I changed. More accurately, my cancer changed me. Soon, I was too weak and tired to spend all that much time bouncing around on the thing. So I just stopped. I hadn't even gone near the trampoline in what must have been years.

I hadn't been expecting to hear the back door creak open and slam shut again. But I still wasn't startled. I heard the sound of bare feet padding across the pseudo-wood planks of the deck, then the grass. Mikasa landed haphazardly next to me, the rubber mat dipping under her weight and tilting me in her direction.

"There you are," she said. "What are you doing out here?"

"Nothing, really," I mumbled. The sun was finally finishing up its rounds and sinking below the horizon. It must have been almost nine. Dad still wasn't home yet.

"Then why did you come out to the trampoline to nothing when you could have nothinged just as easily inside?"

I rolled my eyes. "I don't know. It was a nice day and I wanted to enjoy it before the sun went down?"

"Yeah, sure you did." Mikasa sprawled herself out next to me and stared up at the darkening sky. "I was looking for you."

"Why?"

"Why not?" She rolled over onto her side to look at me. "I wanted to talk to you about something."

"What was it?"

"Support group."

I let out a long, growling sigh. "I thought we talked about that enough today. You know, at the actual support group meeting."

"I'm not asking about the stuff we talked about at the meeting today. It's about the group itself."

"Haven't we been over this before?" I asked disdainfully.

"Yes," Mikasa said. "But I felt like I should keep up with it. Just in case anything changes."

"Okay..." I mumbled, replaying that day's meeting in my head. "I don't exactly hate it, but I'm also not thrilled that it's something I do. So I guess that makes me pretty indifferent."

"Hm. It's an improvement over hating it, I guess."

I stared blankly up at the sky for a while longer. I remembered the feeling of the woven black rubber holding me up. It had been a long time since I had felt it last.

"We used to have a lot of fun on this thing, didn't we?" I said.

"Yeah, we did," Mikasa absently replied.

Things went quiet for a while longer.

"You know, if you'd been really adamant about saying no, I wouldn't have made you go."

A miniscule jolt ran through my body as if I had been disrupted in the middle of falling asleep. "What?" I said numbly.

"I wouldn't have forced you to join the support group if you really hadn't wanted to."

I sat up and looked down at Mikasa's blank, daydreaming face. "Then what was all that about drugging me and bringing me to the first meeting in the trunk of dad's car for?"

"Hey, you drew that conclusion yourself. I didn't do anything but agree with you."

"Then why did you spend... what was it? Twenty minutes convincing me that it wasn't a complete atrocity of an idea?"

"I just wanted to make sure you had the facts before you made your decision. I knew you'd fight me about it at first, but if you kept on fighting I would have stopped. And you didn't. So here we are."

I dropped back down onto the trampoline. "Well, don't I feel stupid now."

It was Mikasa's turn to loom over me. "What makes you say that?" she asked.

"I..." I opened my mouth and drew in a sharp inhale to start berating her with reasons why I never had any motive for going other than her. I suddenly realized I didn't have any. In that instant, every single argument that would have seemed perfectly viable a week ago had fallen flat.

"I... don't know."

Whether I liked it or not, something in me had wanted to go to that support group. And now...

"I didn't think so," Mikasa murmured.

I took a deep breath and stared up at the sky. The sun had disappeared, and the vivid bluish-grey was fading quickly into black. The color reminded me of something. I wasn't entirely sure what.

"So what were you and Levi talking about?"

I looked over at Mikasa. "You mean while we were waiting outside?"

"Yeah. It seemed pretty important."

"I thought you were listening."

"Come on, Eren. What kind of prying snitch do you take me for?"

I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes. "It wasn't much. Just philosophy and cancer stuff."

"Certainly seems like the subject of the day, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. It does."

I have no idea how long we spent lying out on the trampoline. The sky had long since gone dark. I probably would have fallen asleep out there if it weren't for the sound of my dad's car pulling into the driveway letting me know I had to go back inside.


	7. Getting A Life

**Merry Christmas, everybody. I'm five days late.**

**It's been a while since the last update. Why don't we go ahead and post one today? That'll be your present from me this year. A new chapter for all of your feels. **

**I hope you guys are liking this story so far. Just so you know, it's barely even begun. The whole fanfiction, as far as I've written it, has reached twelve chapters by now, and I'm not even halfway through. I like the reviews I've gotten for it so far, even though my ao3 hits hadn't even breached 300 the last time I checked. So go ahead and keep leaving those reviews. I love hearing what you guys think. **

**Once again, gonna put in these shameless tumblr plugs just in case someone feels like following through with them. My author blog is asking-appelia, and if anyone feels like posting anything about this fic, if you would please tag it "fic: tmiu" "fic: tmi" or "fic: the mosters inside us," that would be nice. I'm giving you guys a bit of a selection there, so you can pick whatever you think sounds best. **

**I wanted to wish you guys a happy nondenominational winter holiday. So... merry Festivus, everyone. It's late, but it doesn't matter. It's the thought that counts. Right? RIGHT?**

**Update: I've started working on the story again, and I realized that I screwed up the order of a few things. So THERE I FIXED IT. Whoever finds the change wins the fantastic nothing prize.**

**Never mind. Story time.**

* * *

><p>Thursday brought on the next meeting with the support group that I was surprisingly going to of my own free will.<p>

Mikasa had been working in her library volunteer position that morning with a gathering of other Shiganshina students, so one of the seniors offered to give us a ride. I couldn't help feeling relieved. I would be saved another self-inflicted guilt trip for making my dad miss out on work. And for forcing him to spend time in close proximity to me. For some reason I always felt like he never wanted to be around me. Or maybe I was the one who didn't want to be around him. The result was the same either way.

No one had gone missing from support group yet. Conference room 4A still held twelve people, all of them looking just as alive as the last time I'd seen them. I guessed Levi's predictions hadn't come true just yet. Schroedinger's Support Group was still just as lively and un-dying as ever.

To change things up, I looked for Armin instead of letting him search the room for me. I found him standing in the corner, an oatmeal cookie in one hand and his cell phone in the other. And standing in front of him was...

What the fuck was Annie doing with him?

I came to a dead stop and decided to watch for a while. The two of them were standing in complete silence, the both of them fixated on their phones. At first I wasn't sure if they were standing close together on purpose or if they had been playing on their phones and somehow wandered into each other's orbit. Then Annie's eyes suddenly widened. A smile broke out on her face and her shoulders began shaking. She looked like she could have been laughing, although I didn't hear any noises coming from her. I shuddered internally. The whole permanent-silence thing could be really creepy sometimes.

Her eyes flicked up from her phone and fixed on Armin's face. He did the same, flashing her a small, shy smile. So they were having a conversation. It probably would have been a bad idea to get into the middle of it.

"Hey, Eren. Good to see you again."

My head whipped around to look over my shoulder. A pair of soft brown eyes met with mine. "Marco," I said absently.

"Polo," he replied with a laugh.

After a quick glance around to confirm that there was no Jean lurking nearby, I turned around to face him. "Does this look like a swimming pool to you?" I asked.

He smiled warmly at me. "It's a recurring joke. You'll get used to it."

"Okay," I murmured, shifting my weight around on my feet.

"Hey, about the thing from last meeting, with the darkest submission we've ever gotten for the open-ended assignments..."

"Yeah. You said you were going to explain that, right?" I had completely forgotten about his promise from the last meeting. In fact, until he brought it up, that conversation had just about ceased to exist to me. I made a mental note to work on my memory of past conversations. If I was going to make friends the way Mikasa was subliminally pushing me to, it was a skill I was going to need.

"That was the idea," he said. "In the second year the group was operating, there was this one kid. I can't remember his name offhand, but he had pancreatic cancer, like me. He was pretty bad. He'd been diagnosed late, and his doctor had given him only a few months to live, even though they were still trying to treat him and everything else. He was probably the worst case anyone here has ever seen. Not just cancerwise, I mean. His attitude was probably worse than his disease ever was. He spent the entire time talking about how he had already accepted the fact that he was going to die, and he didn't need to go to group therapy to come to terms with it, and a whole bunch of other crap that everyone else got tired of pretty quickly. I don't think the support group did anything to help him. Or maybe he just didn't let it help, since, you know, group therapy is sort of a mutual thing."

I nodded. Didn't that sound familiar. "What about the composition?"

"It wasn't just the first one," Marco explained. "It was all of them. Every single submission he made was about death. It was never anything but death with him. It was like that was all he could think about, like he didn't see his life going in any other direction. I guess that was why no one was surprised when he stopped showing up."

I felt a block of ice settling inside of me. "Did he..."

"Yeah," Marco replied listlessly. His eyes had gone dark. It was kind of scary, coming from someone who seemed so positive as he always did. "He was kind of setting himself up for it, though. But I still think sometimes... was he really being a cynic, or was he just trying to see things the way they really were?"

"It sounds like he was just being a dick," I said. I needed to say something. Anything to get that horrible look off Marco's face. I felt around in the cluttered shelf space of my mind for my store of conversation starters that didn't seem to exist. "So... this is your fourth year with the group, right?"

Marco brightened up immediately. It was only a tiny change, but it was something. "Yeah. I've been getting treated at Trost since I was twelve. I was pretty friendly with all the nurses here, and one of them just brought up the support group while I was in for a treatment a few years ago. I joined pretty much without a second thought."

So he didn't even have to get dragged into this like I did. He had just jumped in all on his own. "Why was that?"

"Don't know," Marco said with a shrug. "I guess I just wanted to get to know some new people. Get help, give it to others. Make some more friends, you know?"

"You really didn't strike me as the kind of guy who needs help making friends."

Marco laughed, the same way that he did when we first started talking. It was nice to see him back to normal. "You don't even know," he replied. "I was diagnosed in fifth grade. I wound up losing contact with almost all of my friends from school in the first year. Well, except for Jean." He paused for a second, as if he were taking a second to think something over. "You know, Jean was actually the only one who's stayed friends with me since then." He shrugged, as if the thought didn't matter as much as I suddenly felt it did. "That's the sign of a lasting friendship, I guess."

"What, that it doesn't get split up by cancer?"

"Or withdrawing from school and spending half your time together in the hospital. It kind of surprised me, how far out of his way he was willing to go just to hang out with me." He glanced at something over my shoulder. I turned around and followed his gaze. Jean and Mikasa were standing by the snack table across the room. He was leaning casually back with one elbow balanced on the table as if it were a bar and he was buying my sister a drink. She didn't seem to be paying him any attention. I genuinely hoped she wasn't.

I scoffed. "He just doesn't know when to quit, does he?"

"No, Jean's just a little... strong-willed." Marco had such a nice way of saying _he's a stubborn asshole._

"Strong-willed. I'll remember that."

* * *

><p>The LPNs gathered us into the circle not much later. We kicked off the meeting by asking a few more questions. It seemed that the group still wasn't quite finished getting to know each other. After that, we bounced a conversation around the circle in popcorn fashion, letting it go in whatever direction it would. Someone pointed out that Bertolt had worn shorts to the meeting, and his bone-replacement scars were showing. There were a ton of them. He quickly explained that his osteosarcoma had started around his ankles and he'd had almost all of the bones in both legs replaced with prosthetic pieces, as well as one of his hips and a few vertebrae. He had still been growing when the first ones had been put in, so a few of the pieces were a little disproportionate, but not so much that they wouldn't work properly. All it meant was that he'd be a little unsteady on his feet for the rest of his life. His legs sported an impressive collection of red, ropey lines where at some point they had been cut open, the bones inside replaced and the membranes stitched back together. The longer I stared, the more I thought they looked like the skin had been peeled away and left a line of exposed muscle underneath. I spent the rest of the meeting on-and-off staring at Bertolt's legs.<p>

After 4:00 finally came around and the circle broke apart, I spotted Armin milling around in the corner by the snack table. He had his phone out again, but there was no Annie to be seen (or heard). I weaved through the crowd and made my way over to him.

"Hey," I said. I glanced down to see one of his hands resting next to the cookie containers that had been the YCSG's food contribution for the day. He reached in and grabbed one, despite the obvious fact that there was nothing but oatmeal raisin left.

Armin looked up from his phone, blinking in surprise. "Huh? Oh, hey, Eren."

"You actually eat those?" I asked, nodding down at the cookies.

"Yeah. Why not?" he replied, picking one out and nibbling at the edges in a way that made him look kind of like a blonde, blue-eyed mouse.

"They're nasty. No one ever takes them."

"I know. I never really cared though. I think they're okay." He glanced down at the brownish mass of oats and raisins in his hand. "They're always the last ones left, too. It kind of makes you feel bad for them, doesn't it?"

"Not really. I've never gotten emotionally attached to a box of cookies before."

Armin looked up at me and sighed. "Don't tell me you no longer want to be friends with me because I like to eat the cookies that no one else takes."

I sucked in a deep breath and made a concerned face. "I don't know, Armin. That's getting pretty close to crossing the line, there."

The annoyance on his face dissolved into a smile and he shoved the remainder of the cookie into his mouth. "Oh, look. The problem's gone now," he mumbled around the crumbs. "Can we be friends again?"

"Dork," I laughed, turning to walk towards the exit with him at my heels. Mikasa met up with us at the door.

"Hey. Dad just texted me. Some specimens grew out of their petri dishes and they need to organize a cleanup."

I set my teeth and sighed. "So he's going to be late again?"

"Yep," she confirmed. Her eyes wandered from my face to the awkward blonde twig of a guy standing next to me. "Hi."

"Hi," Armin said shyly.

"You're... Armin, right?"

"Yeah. And you're Mikasa?"

"Does anyone else in the support group look like they'd have a Japanese name?"

Armin let slip a nervous laugh. "Heh. No. I-I mean, I guess not."

Mikasa gave him a faint smile. "Well, it's nice to know you remembered."

I cut in. "How could he not remember? Jean's been proposing to you at every meeting since we joined."

Mikasa's smile dropped. "Eren, I thought we agreed to avoid talking about that at all costs."

"Tell Jean that."

Mikasa exhaled heavily and flicked a hand at me. "Nope. I am done. This conversation is over."

Armin and I hung back as she walked out ahead of us. "I'll be outside waiting for you two to catch up," she shouted over her shoulder.

Armin stared after her for a minute, then turned to look at me, his eyebrows so raised that they were hiding under his bangs. "Is she always like that?"

"Pretty much," I said with a shrug. "I'm that way too, most of the time. I guess it's just our way of showing affection or something."

Armin's eyebrows returned to visibility. "Oh. Okay."

"Oi, brats. If you keep hanging around here any longer, you're going to have to clean up with us."

The both of us spun around at the sound of Levi's all-too-familiar voice. At some point he had snuck up behind us without making a sound, despite the plastic bags looped over both his arms that should have been rustling together and giving us at least a subtle warning that he was there. I glanced around the room and was struck by the fact that Armin and I were the only ones left.

"S-Sorry, Levi, we'll get going," Armin stuttered, grabbing my arm and making a beeline for the hallway.

"Good choice." Levi turned away from us and started back towards the table. I opened my mouth to make some sort of witty response, but Armin started towing me out the door before I could say a single word.

I still managed to shout "See you next week, nurseman!" at the top of my lungs before getting dragged out into the hallway, 4A's door falling shut behind us.

Once we'd put a whole three corridors between us and the conference room, Armin slowed down and turned to me, a questioning look on his face. "Nurseman?"

"Long story," I said, my face starting to heat up. "He was my nurse last summer when I had to get a liver tumor treated. It was sort of a one-time thing, really. I just said something stupid to him once, but I'm pretty sure he still remembers it."

"You really think he'd remember something you said to him once? And that long ago?"

"I don't really think Levi is the type that forgets things easily."

The hallways grew gradually brighter as we walked. Soon we were standing in front of the glass-plated entryway of the cancer center. Mikasa was waiting for us outside, just as she said she'd be.

"Hey," I said with a casual wave. "Miss us?"

"Not really. I was too busy enjoying the show." I noticed the signature _seriously?_ look on Mikasa's face as she nodded towards the multitude of cars parked in the lot.

"The show?" I asked, my gaze following her directions and landing on a cheap, broken-in Neon parked a few rows back from the entrance. Two figures were leaned up against it, pressed flush against each other and appearing conjoined at the mouth. After a minute of staring I recognized them as Bertolt and Reiner. "Hold on a second. Are they... together or something?"

"Yeah," Armin replied.

"For how long?" Mikasa asked.

"Two years. They started going out after their first year in the support group."

I suddenly found my eyes glued to their explicit PDA. The longer I stared, the more awkward feelings came surging up inside me. I had no idea why I was having them in the first place. It was just a couple of guys making out against a car. No big deal. Nothing to get excited about. For a brief second, their mouths separated. Bertolt whispered something, and Reiner responded just as quietly, his mouth imitating the motions that his boyfriend's had made. Then Bertolt's head fell forward and they were once again going at it as if the world were ending around them.

"What are they saying?" I wondered out loud.

"They have this whole 'always' thing," Armin explained. I blinked, not realizing that the question had strayed outside of my head, and was finally able to tear my eyes away from the makeout session and fix them on his face instead. "I've seen it up close. It was... It was an accident," he added, looking slightly embarrassed. "Reiner explained it to me. They say it to each other all the time. It's supposed to mean they'll always love each other, they'll always be there for each other, that kind of thing."

"Hm," Mikasa hummed in acknowledgement, her eyes still inseparably glued to Reiner and Bertolt's whispery, tongue-ridden display. "That's pretty sweet, actually."

"Yeah, I guess it is," I agreed, trying to resist the uncontrollable urge to turn back and keep watching them stick their tongues down each others' throats. "Sometimes you just need something to be for always. Especially when you don't know how long always is going to last."

Suddenly everyone's eyes had switched focus from the everlasting-cancerous-love display to me. I felt my face burst into flames. _Way to darken the mood, Eren._

"You're kind of right, I guess," Armin said, turning back to the beaten-up Neon. The two lovebirds had finally separated and were climbing into the car, Reiner to the driver's side and Bertolt to the passenger seat. "That was actually what Bertolt had been thinking when he had first asked Reiner out. He'd had two bone replacements since joining the group, and everyone was worried the spreading would continue, so he figured he would just give it a shot while he still had the chance, and... well, you see how that turned out."

I watched as the Neon pulled out of its parking space and rolled out into the road before turning to Armin again. "How do you know all of this?"

"I've been talking to Reiner a lot," he said. "He's actually really friendly. He gave me his phone number at the first meeting. He texts me all the time. He must have a remedy for severe social awkwardness or something that he wanted to give me."

"Do you think he has anything for me?" I asked.

Mikasa smirked. "I don't think social awkwardness and an aversion to life itself are the same thing."

"Hey, I'm not averse to life. I just don't have one."

"You could have one if you wanted one."

I rolled my eyes. "Excuses, excuses."

"Well what were you planning to do all summer before I signed us up for YCSG?"

I cast Mikasa a sharp sideways glance. "Hey, it's not my fault. I was in kind of a dark place."

She cocked her head to the side. "You _were_?"

"I'm getting out of it. Slowly."The mood started to lighten as the minutes passed us by while we were leaning up against the wall and staring out at the parking lot. Armin's grandpa hardly ever picked him up on time, and our dad had at least warned us that he would be running late that day. We were stuck outside for almost half an hour. But for some reason, it didn't feel like it was that long. The minutes ticked past in quick succession instead of dragging painstakingly by. I never realized exactly how much faster time went when I wasn't suffering through it.

Somewhere in the middle of a philosophical discussion on the importance of Hot Topic as a religion or something like that, a white Accord straight out of 1996 came rolling out of the street and into the parking lot. Armin stopped laughing and tensed up, watching the car as it drove steadily closer to us. "That's my grandpa. I have to get going."

"Oh. Okay," I said, feeling more than a little disappointed. Somewhere deep down, I'd wanted both our rides home to show up at the same time for the sole purpose of not having to stand there without him. "I'll see you Tuesday, then."

"See you." He took a few leisurely steps toward the curb as the car rolled up alongside it. A second before he reached for the handle, Armin spun back around. "Wait. I can't believe I forgot. I wanted to ask you something."

"What is it?" I asked, brightening up at the prospect of a few extra Armin minutes.

He slipped a hand into his pocket and dug out his cell phone. "Can I have your cell number?"

My brain stuttered as if he'd been speaking in C++. "What?" I asked dumbly.

"I just wanted to know if you would give me your number. You know, to text and stuff. If you want to." Armin dropped his gaze and stared at his phone. "I've gotten phone numbers from a few of the YCSG members, and since you'd been talking to me lately, I just thought-"

"Oh. Yeah. Sure, it's fine," I blurted out, hoping desperately that I didn't sound too much like I lived under a rock. Although I sort of did. I hadn't given anyone my phone number in years.

Armin looked back up at me and smiled. "Really? You would?"

"Yeah. Here, give me your phone."

Armin obediently handed it over. I punched my digits into the keypad. "Just text me later and let me know it's you, okay?" I said.

"Mind giving him my number too?" Mikasa cut in. She looked pointedly at Armin, the traces from the earlier smiles still on her face. "Eren doesn't always answer his phone. And if you really need someone to talk to..."

Armin stared at her as if she'd gotten down on one knee and proposed. "That would be great. Here. I'll open up another-"

"No, it's alright. I've got it." I opened up another contact slot and added Mikasa to his contact list. It wasn't all that impressive. The only numbers he had stored were those of a few family members. I noticed that Marco, Annie and Reiner had recently been added to the list. I gave his phone back to him, and he turned away, a smile lighting up his face.

"Thank you so much!" he borderline squealed, pulling the passenger door of the Accord open. "I'll text you guys soon, okay?"

"Okay."

"See you next week, Armin."

"See you." He pulled the door shut and we watched his grandpa's car peel away from the curb and out into the road.

* * *

><p>True to his word, Armin texted me less than an hour later. I saved his number into my contact list and in the process took note of the fact that mine was even more pitiful than his. The only numbers programmed into my phone were mine, my dad's and Mikasa's. I also had Dr. Erwin's office on my list, but I had never used it. It was really only there in case of an emergency.<p>

My new best (correction: only) friend texted me again the next day. Our conversation didn't last all that long. I gave up on trying to be social after about twenty minutes and retreated back into the magical realm of Netflix. Sure enough, Armin texted me again the day after. This time, I actually held up a conversation with him while watching my usual endless chain of Supernatural episodes. It required a considerable amount less effort than it had the first few times. I thought I was making some serious improvement in my socialization skills. Then he sent me this.

**Armin: Are u busy right now?**

I poised my thumbs over the screen, ready to type a short-and-to-the-point "yes" and continue on my quest to find out what the hell the Winchesters would be doing about the always-impending apocalypse. I stopped just short of pressing send. After a quick evaluation of my life so far, I reconsidered my response.

**Me: No.**

**My phone went off again a minute later.**

**Armin: Cool. Is ur dad home?**

**Me: Y r u askin**

**Armin: Bc I wanted to come over maybe?**

I stared down at my phone, not entirely sure if I was reading correctly. Was he serious? Someone actually wanted to come visit me? How long had it been since someone had asked to come over to my house?

**Me: You mean now**

**Me: Today**

**Armin: Not like RIGHT NOW, but sometime soon i guess. Why? Are u doing work or home alone or something?**

I looked up from my phone and listened to the silence that seemed to be echoing through the house. My dad had left for work before I had even woken up that morning. Mikasa had gone out to her library job hours earlier. So yes, I was home alone. But that didn't mean anyone had to know I had done anything other than hide in my room all day with my headphones on and my laptop acting as the only light source.

**Me: Yeah sure u can. When do u want to come over?**

**Armin: Is today okay?**

**Me: You think i have anything else to do?**

**Armin: Ok lol. Today then. You said u live in Shiganshina, right?**

**Me: Yea. Wbu?**

**Armin: WEIRD. I'm looking up your house on Mapquest. You are like 5 minutes away from me.**

**Me: What dude how do you live so close to me?**

**Armin: Idk. I don't get out much. :l**

**Me: Neither do I lol. See you in a bit.**

* * *

><p>Six and a half minutes later, the distant vibrations of an outdated car engine began to travel through the framework of the house. I ripped my headphones off of my ears and jumped up from my bed. I scrambled around my room for a few seconds, yanking the shades up and letting the afternoon sunlight in, kicking dirty clothes under the bed, and especially looking myself over and making sure I was presentable. At least I'd remembered to change out of my pajamas that day. If I ever had to face anyone in a shitty t-shirt and boxers again, I didn't think I would survive the encounter. Not that Armin seemed to be the kind to mind all that much about appearances. But I still didn't want him to have to see me looking like I'd just narrowly escaped an awkward morning-after experience.<p>

A minute after the vibrations died down, there was a knock at the door. It was so soft that I could barely hear it from upstairs. I dashed out of my semi-organized room and down the stairs into the entryway. There was a small, scrawny figure standing outside, his eyes hidden under his blonde coconut shell of hair as he stared down at his cell phone. My own cell buzzed in my pocket. I didn't bother answering it and pulled the door open, plastering a smile onto my face.

"Hey, Armin!" I shouted as cheerfully as I could.

Armin jumped as if my greeting had punched him in the face. He stared at me for a second, wide-eyed and blank like a deer in the headlights, before a smile broke out on his face. "Eren! Hi!"

I glanced over his shoulder to see a familiar white Accord pulling away from the curb and driving off down the street. _Armin's grandpa abandoning him again. Great._

"Great to see you. Come in. It's like a fucking sauna out here." I took a step back, pulling the door with me and holding it open. He walked through and I pushed the door closed behind him, shutting the stifling early-July heat outside.

"Thanks for letting me come over," he said, looking around the hallway like a rescue kitten discovering its new home.

"Don't mention it," I replied. "It's no big deal. I really didn't have anything else to do today. I'm still a little confused as to what the sudden desire to visit me was about, though."

Armin made a face and shifted uncomfortably on his feet. "Oh. That was my grandpa's fault, really."

"Your grandpa?"

"Yeah. I was texting you, and he asked me who it was, and I just mentioned that I'd met this guy in support group and maybe we should hang out sometime soon, then..." Armin sighed and shrugged his bony shoulders. "He just told me to ask you if I could come over. I think he's trying to push me to be more social."

Well, that explained tough-love approach regarding his methods of dropping Armin off and picking him up. I laughed under my breath. "Don't we all know what that's like."

"Heh. Yeah," Armin murmured as he followed me into the kitchen. He looked around the room again, an inquisitive look in his eyes. "Weird. It's so quiet around here."

"Yeah, it is. My dad's out at work, and Mikasa is at the library, so I'm just stuck here by myself for the day."

Suddenly Armin turned to me, his eyes widened into sky-blue frisbees. "Wait. You mean we're alone?"

"Yeah. Why do you ask?"

Worry crumpled at the edges of his face. "A-are you sure that your dad's going to be okay with this?"

I shook my head and sighed dismissively. I'd already thought of this ages ago. "My dad probably won't even be home until it gets dark. As long as you're out of the house by then, I'm pretty sure he won't care." Not that I had been planning on telling him in the first place. What he didn't know had never hurt him before, and I was pretty sure it wouldn't start hurting him anytime soon.

"And what about Mikasa?"

Alright, there was a curveball I hadn't even taken into consideration. "Um... Mikasa..."

Armin drew his eyebrows into a frown and sighed. "See? I told you."

"Mikasa probably won't care either," I said flatly. "She'll probably just be happy that I did something other than stream Netflix today." There. That sounded like at least a somewhat viable possibility.

Armin's face finally came out of its worried expression. "Okay. As long as my grandpa doesn't ask to meet your dad afterwards, I guess it'll be okay."

"Right. Besides, it's not like we'll be getting high or hiring hookers or anything."

Armin sighed and stuck out his lower lip like a disappointed six-year-old. "So I guess this means I brought my weed stash and list of phone sex hotlines for nothing."

My mouth dropped open. "Armin!"

His pout disappeared instantly and he looked bewilderedly up at me. "What? Did you think I was actually serious?"

"N-no, I just... What?" I shouldn't have been all that surprised. And I wasn't, really. I just found it a little hard to believe the guy who could probably pass for a twelve-year-old was capable of making perverted jokes, let alone ones that were actually funny.

"Hey, it's not the first time it's happened. Once I told one of the people in my classes that I had a disorder that prevented me from growing at a normal rate and that I was actually almost thirty. He thought I was being completely serious and almost went to the professor about it."

"What? No way."

Armin giggled. "Yes way. I wasn't even trying to fool him or anything! It just happened!"

"Wait a second," I said. "What classes? I thought you were homeschooled."

"I am," he replied. "Well... I was. I finished up the program and got my diploma back in April. I signed up for a few classes at Rose Community College. They have sessions that run over the summer, and my grandpa told me that I should sign up. I have three of them, four days a week."

"What classes are you taking?"

"Mostly English stuff. Literature analysis, art history 101 and creative writing. I'm thinking of taking a music theory course when the fall semester starts."

"Why music theory?"

"I don't know. It's just always sounded like something I would be interested in."

"So you're into music?"

"Yeah. A little." Armin gave me a shameful little smile. "I got into songwriting after I went into remission. I've still got all of the notebooks, even though basically everything I wrote was crap. Then I started teaching myself to play the guitar a little over a year ago. What about you?"

"I'm into music too, but more in the listening way than the composing," I said with a shrug. "I like it, but I can't do it myself. You get what I mean, right?"

"Yeah. Completely," he responded, nodding. "So what do you listen to?"

"Specifically? I don't really know. It's mostly alternative and rock, some electronic, indie, sometimes dubstep... it's just a lot of different stuff."

"Any artists you like?"

"Oh. Let me think. There's... Three Days Grace, Skillet, Mayday Parade, Coldplay..."

"You listen to Coldplay?"

"Yeah. Is that a problem or something?"

"No, just... why?"

"They have a unique composition style, and I like their song lyrics. Most of them are a little deeper than what you usually see in current music."

"Oh," I said. "Anything else?"

He rattled off a list of bands, some of which I recognized. "Wow. I guess we're into a lot of the same stuff."

"I guess we are. Musicwise, anyway."

A smile twitched the corner of my mouth. "Hey, if you're interested, I have my laptop open upstairs. I can show you my library if you want."

Armin's eyes lit up. "You would do that?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

"That would be awesome." A giddy smile had spread across his face once again.

We went upstairs to my room and gathered around my laptop, which I had conveniently forgotten to turn off. We spent a while shuffling through my iTunes library and flipping out over songs that we both happened to have in common. Armin leafed through his iPod and showed me the better part of his own collection. Eventually the laptop escapades strayed from iTunes and landed us somewhere in the weird part of Youtube. We spent at least another hour with my laptop trying to make ourselves forget a series of Gmod animations that had quickly gone from funny to brain-stabbing. Once our brains had been sufficiently numbed, I suggested taking my laptop into the basement, hooking it up to the tv and streaming something on Netflix. Somehow my days always wound up returning me to that lovely website.

We travelled the two flights of stairs down to the basement and plugged an HDMI cable into my laptop's side. After a long, indecisive while spent scrolling through the instant streaming options, we finally settled on _Heathers,_ since there really wasn't anything else decent available that we could agree on.

The front door swung open and slammed shut in the middle of the strip croquet scene.

"Eren, I'm back! What are you doing?"

I froze in place. "Shit."

Armin glanced over at me from the other side of the couch. "What is it?"

"Mikasa," I murmured, looking frantically up at the basement stairs. "I never told her you were coming over." I heard faint footsteps above us behind the dialogue of the movie. She was standing right between the entryway and the kitchen, and the basement door was directly in front of her. If she came down...

Armin spun around toward me, his eyes wide. "Oh god. Are we in trouble now?" he whimpered. "I got you in trouble, didn't I?"

"No, no, it's okay. I'll handle this." I sincerely hoped he didn't hear me mumble "She's going to flip the fuck out" under my breath a moment later.

"Is she really?" His face crumpled.

_Great. He did hear me._

"Oh, god. I'm sorry. I am so sorry, Eren. I shouldn't have asked to come over. I just-"

"Armin," I snapped. He fell silent and stared at me in the flickering half-light of the tv. "It's okay. Really."

He shifted uncomfortably on the couch and sighed. "Okay. If you say so."

I climbed over the back of the couch and landed feet-first on the carpet, leaving Armin to continue watching _Heathers_ in peace. The basement door swung open by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs.

"Eren! There you are!" Mikasa's silhouette said. "I was looking all over the house for you. What are you doing down here?"

"Watching a movie," I replied casually, making my way up the stairs towards her. I glanced back at the couch and Armin lit up by the bluish glow. "With Armin," I added quietly.

Mikasa looked taken aback. "What?"

"Don't freak out okay?" I implored, holding my hands out in front of me.

"Why would I-"

"Armin came over today," I explained, the words coming out so fast they fell over each other on the way. "I wasn't planning on it, we were texting and he just asked me. I know I should have asked dad first, and we're not supposed to have people over without anyone here and everything else, but he just asked and I didn't want to say no, and now he's in the basement, and I swear to god we haven't done anything-"

"Whoa, whoa, Eren, slow down," Mikasa commanded.

"But Mikasa-"

"Eren. Shut up."

I did as I was told and shut up. My sister pressed her fingers to her forehead and sighed. "Okay. So let me get this straight. You invited Armin over to the house?"

"Well, he asked first. I just said yes."

"And he's here."

"Yes."

"Right now."

"Yeah."

"In the basement."

"Uh-huh."

Mikasa fixed me with a level stare and exhaled slowly. "Well, then."

"I'm sorry," I blurted out before I could stop myself. "I know, I should have asked if it was okay or at least told you or Dad that he was coming over-"

"You know what? Whatever."

I froze, my mouth hanging open and my vocal cords caught in mid-sentence. "W-what?"

"Whatever," Mikasa repeated, flicking a hair indifferently out of her face. "I don't care if he just came over. I don't care if you were on the internet this entire time or jacking off or doing cocaine or whatever. You didn't burn the house down, the both of you are still in one piece, and as long as we get him out of here before Dad shows up, no one has to know."

"S-so it's okay if he stays?" I stuttered in disbelief.

"Yeah," she replied with a shrug. "Just not too long. We should probably get him out of here before dinner."

I nodded in silent agreement. We both knew Dad wouldn't be home until long after then.

After the issues were resolved, the both of us headed into the basement. Armin hadn't moved an inch from his spot on the couch. He spun around at the sound of our footsteps pounding down the stairs.

"H-hi, Mikasa," he stuttered, giving my sister a shy smile.

"Hey," Mikasa responded, traipsing across the room and vaulting over the back of the couch. She landed gracefully on the cushions and glanced at the tv screen. "What are you watching? _Heathers_?"

Armin seemed to melt in relief. "Yeah, actually. It was the only good thing they had to stream today."

"Awesome. I freakin' love this movie." Mikasa curled up in the corner between the couch back and armrest. I tried to walk past her without blocking too much of the screen, but still she grabbed me around the waist and tugged me backwards. My legs gave out like the toothpicks they were and I crashed ass-first into the couch, letting out an awkward noise of surprise and earning myself a laugh from Armin. I snuggled into the cushions between the two of them and we finished the rest of _Heathers_ in partial silence, interspersed with comments about what the fuck was going on with teens in the J.D.'s bomb went off and the credits began rolling, Mikasa took out her cell phone and checked the time. It was almost 5 in the afternoon. We still had about a solid two hours before anyone had to go anywhere, so we didn't move. The three of us just stayed in the basement, sprawled out to varying degrees on the couch. Most of the time was spent talking, bouncing back and forth between random subjects, ranging in deepness from how hot thigh-high socks are to what the fuck happened with all of our parents. As it turned out, Armin's parents had met in a hospital support group, kind of like the one all of us had just joined. His dad had been diagnosed with lymphoma at 22, the same cancer that Armin's grandma had died from before he was born, and his mom was 21 with a five-year-old breast cancer diagnosis. Things led to other things, and two years later they were married and Armin came into existence. But, sure enough, things went to shit three years later. Armin's mom had a reoccurrence, and the cells were exponentially more aggressive than before. So she died. He hadn't said anything more on the subject. He was diagnosed with lymphoma when he was six, and at around the same time his dad's condition was starting to worsen. He died a year later. Armin explained that his dad had supposedly been living on borrowed time. His cancer had progressed much further than his son's had by the time he was diagnosed. Even though they were stages apart, it still sometimes felt like his dad had traded his own life for his son's. That was how he had described it. He'd been living with his cancer-free grandpa ever since.

We quickly steered the conversation towards something that was much less dark. First it was Armin's purple blob cancer, then the other metaphorical renderings of terminal illness, then the YCSG in general. Then suddenly...

"So how have things been with you and Levi?"

I would have been sitting up pin-straight in shock if I weren't hanging upside down on the couch with my feet over the back and my head dangling off the seat. Still, a small jolt of surprise ran through my body, threatening to send me sliding headfirst towards the floor.

"L-Levi?" I asked dumbly.

"Yeah," Mikasa said, refolding her legs underneath her. "Have you been talking to him at the meetings or anything?"

At least I could blame the upside-down hanging for the blood that was rushing rapidly to my face. "Yeah. A little."

"What about?"

"Nothing much, really," I said, crunching my stomach and pulling myself upright. "Usually just the support group, what we've been doing lately, that kind of thing."

"And what has he been doing lately?"

"Just the usual. LPN work, that sort of thing." It wasn't a total lie. I was just stating the obvious, since I actually had no fucking idea what else Levi did with his life.

"Nothing out of the ordinary, then."

"Nah. Not that he's told me, anyway."

Armin readjusted on the couch so his head rested next to my legs and his were hanging over the armrest. "What was it like having Levi as a nurse?"

"Weird," I deadpanned.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing about him made any sense," I explained, ignoring Armin's raised eyebrows. "When I first met him, he was a total ass. He snapped at me all the time and made fun of me and called me a brat more times than I have even bothered to count. But then every now and again he would suddenly... soften up? I don't even know. It was like one second he hated me, and then the next he was my best friend. And it never stopped. Not until..."

I suddenly realized where the story was headed and let my sentence drop dead, unfinished. I hadn't told anyone about what had happened that day. And I wasn't sure that I would ever want to.

"Until..." Armin prompted, his voice quiet.

I stared at the floor and shook my head. "Nothing."

"No, not nothing. Something," Mikasa murmured, inching closer to me. "What was it?"

"I already told you. It was nothing."

"No, it wasn't. Come on. The cycle never stopped until..."

"Do you guys really want to know that badly?"

The both of them stared expectantly at me. I felt the tips of my ears starting to heat up as if someone were holding a match nearby.

"It wasn't anything important. Really."

The staring didn't stop.

I sighed, feeling as though every inch of my skin were on fire. "Okay, fine." I took a deep breath and murmured the rest. "I might have held his hand before going into surgery. And... maybe told him about my deepest fears in a moment of desperation. But that was it. I got released a few days later and that was it."

The room was quiet for a moment before Armin spoke up. "I didn't know you guys were so close."

"That's the thing," I said, picking absently at a loose thread in the couch. "We aren't."

"You never told me that that happened," Mikasa said.

I dropped my gaze back to the carpet. "I didn't tell anyone that it happened. It was just kind of embarrassing and I never saw the point in saying anything about it. It's not like I was ever planning to talk to him again after I got released."

"But you did anyway," Armin added quietly.

"Yeah," I quipped, flopping over sideways next to him. "And now everything's fucking awkward."

"Why do you think it's awkward?" Mikasa asked. She grabbed my legs and pulled them into her lap, straightening me out over the couch.

"Because of what happened and all the things I told him, and then how we just stopped talking as if that summer in the hospital had never happened at all. And now he's back, and..." I sighed and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. "I just don't know what to say to him."

Armin gave me a little hum of acknowledgement. "Well, you don't have to go mentioning that right away. Maybe if you guys hung out a little more you could reconnect or something."

I strained my eyes to look over at him. "What makes you think we want to reconnect?"

"I don't know," he said, the cushion shaking as he shrugged his shoulders. "It just sounds like you guys were really close."

"Yeah. Were."

The three of us fell silent for another minute. The conversation was almost as sporadic as the one we'd had during _Heathers_ now.

"Why would he want to hang out with me, anyway?" I rhetorically asked.

Mikasa curled up, squishing my feet in her lap. "What makes you say that?"

"He's a college student. And a nurse. Unlike me, he actually had a life outside the support group. Besides, I don't even know how old the guy is. And something tells me that it's not exactly his dream come true to waste his life hanging out with some random cancer-stricken teenager."

"But that's what he does for his job," Armin pointed out.

"That's the difference," I deadpanned. "He gets paid to do it."

* * *

><p>Half an hour later, Mikasa checked the time on her phone again and figured that our dad would be home in an hour or two. We would have to get Armin out of the house before he showed up if we wanted to keep everything quiet. Armin called his grandpa, and Mikasa gave him some bullshit excuse about how there was a chemical accident in the lab and he'd had to run out to take care of it, just in case grandpa wanted to come in and meet the elusive Mr. Jaeger.<p>

Twenty minutes later, he pulled up in his shitty Accord in front of the house. We said goodbye to Armin and promised to talk more at the next support group meeting. Then Mikasa and I went about hiding the evidence that anyone other than the two of us had been in the house that day. Luckily, Armin wasn't very much of a messy houseguest and there wasn't a lot of evidence that we had to cover up. The basement was relatively clean, and my room was always a disaster area, regardless of whether I had friends over or not. So when Dad finally came home, no questions were asked.


End file.
